Episode 205 of Mastering Dungeons! Main topic: PC Creation in 2024 5E and Greyhawk’s Regions! 2024 changes the order for character creation… for the better? We review Greyhawk’s North Kingdom, Nyrond, Onnwal and the Pale, looking at how to make settings interesting for players. News: PH in Stores, PAX West Report, Greg Tito Leaves WotC, and more! Contents 00:00 PAX West Report 04:08 Hate Balance? 06:32 Balance with Flavor? 09:26 Weapon Mastery Compensation? 14:17 D&D Direct 15:54 2024 DMG and MM 18:07 Translations Delayed and Changed 19:18 Jess Lanzillo 21:46 New Releases 27:46 Sigil VTT 33:39 Traveller Sold to Mongoose 35:16 NPR Covers D&D 36:54 Greg Tito Leaves WotC 42:08 2024 PH in Stores and Beyond 42:49 Free 2024 Rules 46:19 2024 Really Bigger? 48:00 Character Creation 2024 vs 2015 52:25 2024 Starts with Rules 57:27 Class 57:48 Origin After Class 01:03:31 Mechanical Order vs Narrative 01:05:13 Ability Scores 01:10:37 Alignment and Details 01:18:46 Greyhawk's North Kingdom 01:24:58 Nyrond 01:30:23 Onnwal 01:33:11 The Pale 01:36:59 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.
Thank you.
hello and welcome to all the role-playing game players game masters designers and fans out there this is mastering dungeons i'm sean here with my super energized co-host teos abadia happy almost labor day but happy return from pax days yes i uh i am a weird mix of energized by everything that happened at pax and exhausted by how much energy it took to run everything there plus my work week
I believe it. So good packs. It was an amazing packs on a number of levels. I got to see that game. That was really fun. There were some very, very hilarious things like Omen drawn escaping the dad like duties of his business franchise by going to the bathroom and hiding there for an hour. And then Perkins sent him messages. So he's like getting the messages while he's on the potty.
And then he casts create water, washes his hands and looks at the crowd and says, because I'm not an animal. It's just the kind of dad humor I'm here for.
that's that's that's what we love about uh at kink yep and uh and let me just say the packs i mean i can't i don't know that i can share the full numbers of how many people came but it was twice as big as last year it was and and then some it was unbelievable we had two fire marshal
type incidents where everybody was working together to solve how do we handle the massive amount of people who are trying to run in and go straight for the D&D area. It was a sea of people and just shocking. And anybody out there listening, if you were one of the folks who came by and said hi and thanked us for the show,
thank you again um if you admin thank you if you dm'd thank you if you played thank you it was so cool to see great people we had robert pasley from uh our patreon he was there yeah what an incredible guy he's running and and then he's like you want me to run some more and then you want me to keep running and then then he says you know i have dinner with my wife i should really go
Lots of stories like that are just people going above and beyond where they needed to do that. And what else? Yeah, we got the anniversary special die. We had the uni and the hunt for the last horn preview of the 2024 rules adventure that I mean, players loved it. They had so much fun going back into the world of the of the 80s and comic, what do you call it, a cartoon.
And and they just, you know, played their hearts out and were super positive. And that was one really interesting thing is The entire weekend, I really had just one person who said anything about not being excited about D&D in 2024. And they weren't a player. They were just somebody kind of walking by. And everybody else was just so excited, so positive. They either didn't know anything about it.
which is kind of funny for those of us who just live this stuff. Yeah. Or they had a vague notion or they were really into it. Like one guy just he gets on his phone because we had a copy of the book there. He gets on his phone and he's like, can I call my friends? And we're like, yeah.
And he calls his friends and one by one goes through with them how their characters have changed in like the most excitement you can imagine. Right. So that was that was the world I was in for the last four days. And it was a lot of fun.
Yeah, shows like that are great. Those sort of, not Acquisitions Incorporated, but acquisition shows where brand new people or people who are just curious or aren't steeped in the hobby like we are coming and just enjoying themselves. Just an amazing, amazing time. Totally. You're tempting me to come out there next year, Teo. You really should. It's so much fun. That's what I'm hearing.
That's what I'm hearing. But there are also excitement in our listeners and they write to us sometimes. So we're going to go to our listener corner here. We're going to first talk to Chris via Blue Sky. Now, Chris asked this question based on one of the tips that I put up on Blue Sky, TTRPG writing tips.
And what I was talking about was balance and how balance in a game can be important for a role playing game. Sometimes balance is not wanted. And so he said, would you mind to elaborate? Why do you think that many would hate a game that has very strict balance in the player options? Why do you think it's not fine for cooperative role-playing games, but it's fine for competitive games?
And I said, well, it's all from my experience and my reading playtest feedback. A big criticism we see of rules is that, well, this is too much like the Bard or yeah, this is stepping on what the Rogue is supposed to do. And 4E absolutely got criticized because the classes did not feel different enough.
The fighter and the wizard both did damage and then imposed the condition, and the flavor was different, but the outcome was the same and people didn't like that. So in that case, a game that was incredibly well-balanced got criticized because of it, not praised. Do you have that similar experience with that?
Yeah, I mean, and the funny thing, fourth edition, right, was trying to solve the problem of the wizard is too different from the fighter, right? Makes all these choices. Where have we heard that before? So therefore, martial characters need something. So what if everybody has that wills and everybody has encounter powers and we're just coloring them differently? Doesn't that solve everything?
No, because people then say everything's the same. There's not enough variance. And so it becomes that difficult thing. How do you make it feel equitable to be a fighter or a wizard, right? It's fair, but it's not the same and it's not necessarily balanced. And even within a class, right? If every choice of what you can take is the same, then you don't feel rewarded for finding that thing.
And that's a thing that video games struggle with and role playing games struggle with. How do you reward the person for finding that thing if there is no thing? So there has to be a thing. And that causes all of this hullabaloo of, look how I found this thing and this loop and whatever, right? Magic the Gathering thrives off of it, right?
Exactly. So Chris came back with a really good question. And Chris said, your answer seems to imply that people hate things feeling samish, but not balanced per se. Would you say that people would like balance if the flavor was preserved? I don't see why balance would need for classes to lose their flavor. And that is a really insightful question. So two things come to mind here.
Balance, especially for complex games, it's hard to get balance without sameness. because there are cagey players out there who can see through this sort of forced complexity, right? We may be coming at things from a different direction, but in the end, this game is about either taking away the monster's hit points or keeping the monster from taking away your and your party's hit points.
So you can do lots of tricks, but in the end, the players who care about that can parse it to what they need to see, and they will see that this game is really, truly balanced, and that's not what they want.
And you can never underestimate the number of gamist players out there who come to role-playing games because they want to engage in a complex game with a different variety of inputs, not just everyone's rolling the d20, doing the damage, and imposing the condition. And so they want the game to feel very different, not just story-wise, but balance-wise.
They want to do completely different things and they rail against the game that doesn't do that.
I have two thoughts about that that came to mind when I was saying that. One is we shared stories of things that happened at the table at PAX West, and there was a DM who shared that when they had the monster show up in their learn-to-play scenario, what did the paladin do? He says, well, I'm going to run into that other room and hide. Mm-hmm.
that's what happens when you don't know the game's balance right you can't say oh it's going to be a balanced encounter and in fact an intro level easy balanced encounter i've got nothing to worry about this is a game right that character is doing actually role playing their character and their own selves in quite a good way and you know if you were to say to them look
let me peel back the curtain. This is balanced so you'll have fun and you have zero chance of dying. Well, that would take some of the fun out of it. And that's what happens when things are too balanced.
right and um the other thought i had was someone was talking about honey heist uh at the con and how you have these two stats and one of the things that even though you just have these two stats they can one goes up the other one must go down so that you upset that balance right and keep that interest you're giving up something you're not just getting and getting right and that's because of this whole issue
Yeah, very true. And then the second question comes via Patreon from David Fetter. Last week, we talked about weapon mastery. And so David said, I like how most of the weapon mastery talk echoes a little bit of my own home rule. But after your discussion of the new rules, I'm afraid that they're going to muck up the flow of the game.
I like your idea to treat the mastery effects like encounter powers, or stick with my house rules which say the effects key off a critical hit. In either case, you get some of the fun holding the weapon that might push or trip someone without the complicated mechanic of doing it all the time. And then there's a big but...
If I severely limit the opportunity to use these weapon mastery mechanics, aren't I unbalancing the rule set that is designed to have them?
Is there some other bonus that you might grant, like a plus one to hit or damage or something, for weapon master classes that feels like the right amount of compensation to keep power levels as designed without the tactical complexity and power gaming shenanigans? So the question is, am I unbalancing a rule set designed to have these powers? Probably. You definitely do risk that.
And that's something that each DM and their players are going to have to ask themselves after using it. So when I first play 2024 seriously with a campaign, I'm going to use them as is. I'm going to encourage any martial classes to use them because I want to see what it does to a game. With players who are pretty quick and pretty knowledgeable and know how to play quickly, how it works.
But I'm already hearing stories of, well... I had a player pull out their heavy crossbow and shoot an ally in the back because they needed to be 10 feet closer to the monster in order to get there on their next turn. And then we had five characters all pull out their crossbows and shoot the monster to push them 60 feet away so the monster couldn't get to them.
And then they just kept doing that the whole time. So we're already seeing the shenanigans of what happens when you overcomplicate something in order to try to give tactical play, this can be the result.
yeah and that's the thing is you know there yeah you need to adjust it for your group right we get this question uh asked often around forge of foes because in forge of foes we say hey here's how to make you know monsters more thrilling and you can give them monster powers and you can make a new monster or alter it to feed these criteria and then they say well wait haven't i made it harder
yeah you did and if that's a problem at your table then yes you can compensate but probably it's not a problem probably you came to this book because you want the game to be a little more thrilling a little more challenging right similarly if you're going to change up weapon masteries it's probably because you're a little worried about how that'll play given where you are today
But if you're running a campaign, you're thinking, gee, I wish my characters could, you know, the players on my table, their characters would hit harder. I'm like, great. No worries, right? Yeah.
And that's an experiment I would love to see is, all right, you with your weapon mastery, every time you hit with a weapon that has a weapon mastery thing, I'll give you plus three to damage. Or you can do the weapon mastery thing if you really need to.
I wonder how many times people and these power gamers who can figure out the math will say, you know, it's much more important for me to knock this guy prone because everyone else will have a plus. I'm, you know, the monster just went, so it will be prone for everyone. And I've got the rogue there who could sneak attack and I've got the paladin who could smite.
So I really need them to hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it doesn't take long to figure out what things, if you offer that, that little carrot to see how long it takes people to figure out what's really, truly powerful and what's not.
Yeah. And, you know, the easiest thing is to have a conversation with your players and say, I want to test out some variations of how we could run the game. The other option is to do it in world, right? Have some sort of thing like, you know, the enemy illusionist shows up and something washes over you. And now here are the things. Here's how your weapons work, right?
The strange arcane ore bathes you in energies. And for the next session, here are the rules that are in play, right? Yeah. Yeah. Just test it out, and then you can undo it very easily.
Yeah, yeah, very true. So thank you to those very keen and insightful questions. Now let's get into our news segment. We just missed D&D Direct last week, so now we can actually talk about it. What was D&D Direct, you asked? Well, it was a video presentation of staff and gamers sharing what they like about D&D. D&D is imagination, endless possibility, finding your tribe.
And so there were really some nice things in that opening. It's very markety, but it spoke to me directly as somebody who says the things they were saying, right? Most of my friends come from playing D&D. And it has meant the world to me, not just as a game, but as a life thing. And so all of that was wonderful.
Yeah, absolutely. And it was fun to see people in the videos that we knew. You know, one of my friends now has a kid and seeing the kid appear several times in the video like that was really neat. And and seeing, you know, some legends like Claire Hoffman there running a game at Gen Con. So that was really nice to see. Yeah.
And so what they started talking about started with the player's handbook itself, kind of getting people, I think, you know, excited for for this week.
Yeah. And so what did they say about the Player's Handbook? They said, we have rewritten the Player's Handbook from beginning to end. So if someone asks us what's new, we say, yes. They emphasize that the book starts now by teaching new players. And we're gonna get to that in a little bit later in this show. And then they talked about the art.
A little bit of it has been reused, but for the most part, it is brand new. What did they cover about the DMG?
So it was a brief discussion of it being chock full of advice and they showed various pages and it was a lot of fun for me to pause and look and read. And those pages were great. And I spoke to a couple of staff who I trust for how they say things in an even keel manner that we're just talking about. This is the coolest DMG.
One of them said the coolest DMG since the 4E, which I thought was hilarious, but I know what they meant, which is 4E's DMG was so good.
that to attain that level is difficult right and they and they said you know this is at that level of that fourth edition dungeon masters guy just full of useful advice um and in fact all the pages i looked at like chapter one intro in the basics uh discuss what a dm does and we can make out a summary of various things that have changed including
new advice in every chapter, tracking sheets throughout the book that you'll be able to download, encounter building changes, sample adventures and settings, expanded and revised magic items. In the chapter two glimpse, it looks like player types are more prominent now, which is one of the things we talked about when we reviewed the 2014 DMG.
And for chapter seven, treasure, it showed us treasure themes as being used in the monster manual to help color the types of treasure a particular monster will have. And that's a really neat idea.
That is. Then we get to the monster manual where all they really, you know, they give sort of brief hints. I don't even think the monster manual is done yet. So but Jeremy does his superlative thing. This is the most monster packed ever. And they show a lot of art and they talk to the artists, I think, more than the designers, you know, talking about we love dragons. And, you know, it's sort of a.
An updated art style, let's say. A little more fantastical, which, as we've talked about with tone, is moving a little bit more in the direction of the tone that we've talked about for the Monster Manual on the Dungeon Master's Guide.
Yeah, even as Madeus was smiling, which if you've watched the recent Akink episodes, you might know why. There you go.
They talked about translations, and that's something that you've been a big advocate of, Teos. So what's the news there?
yeah it's it's tough uh they say you know we're still working on translations to spanish italian french and german and i'm like that's not exciting or positive other than that you will someday have them but you know it wasn't that long ago that they said we're redoing our whole approach to localization so that we can produce books in the other languages immediately everywhere in the world.
And that seems to have been abandoned. I know it's hard. So I mean, even back when they said they would do that, I said, wow, good luck with that. That's a very, very difficult thing to do. But they have now stepped back from like Japanese isn't on the list, for example. Right. And they've left out several languages that 2014 provided. And
They're going to be later, and so it feels like that battle has shifted and been lost somewhat, and that's a real shame. I hope that the D&D team will go back to localizations and global emphasis because I think that's a tremendous growth opportunity if they can figure it out.
We saw a lot of Jess Lanzillo in this. We've already talked about her background with Magic, and she mentioned her two loves being Magic and D&D and how she gets to bring them together. So she did mention about the importance of game stores and getting the books to them early.
She hints at a new store play program discussing the importance of community and how it can stimulate events at game stores, which then leads players to learn the game, become part of the community, more likely to then buy the books and run at home, et cetera, et cetera. She talks about the Lego minifigs. We saw the dungeon dudes. I was happy to see them discussing.
I was just going to say the folks who don't know, like this is a great, you know, if someone were to ask me, who should we feature that is maybe, you know, known, has some fame to them, but are really great people, great creators, like people you would just want to have in your home campaign. Excellent pick with the dungeon dudes here.
Yep, yep. So Monty and Kelly got to talk about their love of D&D and what it has meant to them to be able to put their stuff on D&D Beyond. So we also saw that Wizards of the Coast would be partnering with folks to get more content out there on D&D Beyond, including Ghostfire Gaming, Cobalt Press, MCDM, Hit Point Press, The Dungeon Dudes, Griffin Saddlebag, Loot Tavern, and Free League.
And we're like, Free League, what? Oh, that's right. They do make a 5e product. What product is that, Teos?
The Lord of the Rings 5e. And on social media, they didn't say it here, but on social media, they showed pictures of various books from partners, including the Lord of the Rings 5e. So we don't know it's only that, like they've got Symbarum 5e, but at least the Lord of the Rings 5e appears like it'll be there, which is kind of neat because, you know, it's also just Lord of the Rings.
So that's another opportunity that more fans will come in through that.
And we've already seen the Lord of the Rings magic set. So it's not surprising, but it's also surprising to see that, especially with the history of the Lord of the Rings and the Tolkien estate and TSR slash D&D. So all that good stuff. And then we get into the future releases, right? We already knew some of this. The Dungeon Master's Guide we'll be seeing in November, November 12th.
The Monster Manual in February, hopefully February 18th of 2025. And then they get into the things that we weren't quite sure about, including a dragon anthology in the summer of 2025, which will be an adventure anthology of 10 short adventures, all featuring dragons, wait for it, in dungeons. Boom. So what did you think when you saw that?
Well, first, I thought they were doing another dragon book. And I'm like, we just had the, you know, Draconomicon remade. But OK, it's an anthology of adventures and like, great. I mean, that seems fine. I you know, they sort of made it sound like, boy, we never have a dragon in a dungeon. And I just immediately thought of like countless examples of that that just went through my mind.
But I'm like, sure, it doesn't hurt. Like, this is great. You know, who doesn't like more dragons and dragons are fun every time an organized play scenario, learn to play thing has it, people get excited, right? They love that. I mean, I think I remember fourth edition, you know, had the demo with the dragon at the end.
And even though it often TPK'd them, it was such a blast for them to go up against a dragon. And so, yeah, this is good to have.
We were wondering about a starter set or a learn to play set. Well, in fall of 2025, we will be getting a starter set. Where will that starter set take us? It will take us to the Keep on the Borderlands. So for those old school folks who remember that, it wasn't even an AD&D, right? It was a D&D basic set adventure taking place way out there on the Keep with the Borderlands.
that abutted the caves of chaos where adventure could take place. So this will be there. It's going to be an expanded or revised version of that with sort of three different sections. There's the keep itself. There's the wilderness that surrounds the keep on those borderlands. And then the Caves of Chaos, the dungeon-type area for that.
And we learned that each book has a short tutorial to help new and returning players learn as they go. And as with the Stormwreck Isle Starter Set, there will be a how-to-play video provided later.
so dms can figure out how to do this if they're learning or even if they're know what they're doing sort of walk them through it yeah yeah and then there'll be a video just uh just the same way that stormwork isle had all those videos and a dedicated kind of website and on the youtube channel so there apparently will be a how to play video for this as well which will be helpful yep
And then we get the big release in late 2025, drum roll please, the Forgotten Realms setting books. So as with 4E, there will be a book for players with the player facing content, and then a book for DMs. They bragged about all the player options that would be there, new subclasses, new spells, new types of spells, said Jason Tondreau with a twinkle in his eye.
They're going to go and introduce factions. Now we've already seen factions in the Forgotten Realms, but they're going to, I think they said, promote a few factions. Some will be the same, some will be different. And then a book, the DM's book will flesh out areas. So they mentioned Baldur's Gate. They mentioned Icewind Dale. They mentioned the Dale Ants and Myth Draenor.
They mentioned the Moonshade Isles, which caught my attention. They mentioned Kalimshan for a different world or biome. So it'll be interesting to see, because when they sent a new book and it'll flesh out areas, I was like, please not the Sword Coast. Please not the Sword Coast. And they started naming off places on the Sword Coast are places we've already seen.
And then they started saying, okay, Kalimshan, Dalelands, Mithgenar. I'm like, all right, we're getting there. It's not quite the full scope, but at least it's a start.
Yeah, and it's interesting because we have the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide already from many years ago. So, you know, what does this do that's different? And then they mentioned Baldur's Gate and you're like, okay, we already have a Baldur's Gate guide in the one adventure. We have the Mithdranor or the Icewind Dale content that was available before.
both of these, you know, through D&D Next release products that then became 5e versions. But it's like, do we really need that again? And I was waiting that they were going to say, you know, and a Waterdeep, but thankfully not. Instead, it got a little more interesting with the Dalelands and Mythdranor and some of the others.
But, you know, hey, like Moonshades has been explored in such great detail by Baldman Games at their Organized Play Adventure series. And I thought to myself, you know, I don't know what's been out there, you know, more than 30 adventures. I'm sure maybe it's more than much more than that. And I know Eric Mankey will let us know. But, you know, did they care about that? I don't know.
Have they looked at that at all? Because there's been so much work done. Yeah, you've done work there. And yeah, so I was very curious what what they will do with the moonshades and Kalimshan especially. Yeah.
Well, they had me write a Moonshade sort of backdrop back for fourth edition. And from that backdrop, which was quite long, we got permission to update it for fifth edition. Bald Man Games put it out on the DMs Guild. And then we started creating adventures from that. So I too am like, hmm, there's been, like you say, a lot written about that. Hopefully it will...
We'll see if they move forward, if they step back, how they work. So that was a look at the books. Then we got a rather large section talking about Project Sigil. Whether that's going to be the name for the tabletop or not, we still don't know. But we learned more and more about it.
We saw shots of the VTT being used, being played with, being used by creators to create the rooms and the hallways, walls, et cetera. Shots were very close up. So you could really see the details on the minis and the artwork that went into it. They showed off Baldur's Gate three characters. What else did we see there?
uh yeah i mean on what you just talked about that wasn't interesting to me because you know like many folks who demoed it at um pax unplugged and it's you know been featured a number of places it's had closed play tests i saw it first when i was uh part of the summit you know normally you're playing it in sort of a up above kind of mode and you're quite distant from things.
And boy, they zoomed in for the maximum shot of how beautiful everything is. I thought that was kind of funny because you would never play at that angle tactically, but it was it did show off how good the graphics are. They then talked about Danger in Dunbarrow, which is going to be the intro adventure.
And Chris Kao tried to beat Jeremy Crawford at the game of superlatives, calling it the best starter. Well, like the best starter pack that's ever existed in Dungeons and Dragons. And I thought, OK, you have my attention. Let's see if that's true. Tell me more. Yeah.
Yeah. And we hear that characters from D&D Band can be brought in with all their abilities, equipment, spells, which was a question that hadn't quite been directly answered yet. And they're also going to have 2D tokens to fill in your needs. And you can also add your own art for those tokens. They did use the term.
That's a clever thought because, and they showed examples of them, right? You can just take any image and, you know, so if you're playing someone else's adventure or something like that, you can take that image, upload it, and boop, there's your token of whatever that creature is that doesn't exist in some other form. So it's neat.
Yep. they used the term modules and then they had to clarify, well, we know modules is an old term for full length adventures. So they're using the term module more as a computer video game thing, where it's a short experience to get a taste of an adventure rather than a full adventure. So you could pull in a cemetery module
right and then play a short adventure with that it doesn't include the full spectrum of an adventure from beginning middle and end and i wondered here whether they may be thinking of you know not just to get you started though of course it can do that and that's important but almost whether they want you to like play it maybe solo or in some other capacity because it had this feeling of like something you might play over and over again
And in fact, then later that we're shown Drizzt, they say Drizzt fighting a robot, but it was Optimus Prime. Right. So that makes me think, OK, you know, Jess and Zio had talked about other properties. So are they going to bring in G.I. Joe and Transformers into Sigil through the Hasbro books that were written by Renegade? You know, it's. It was interesting, right?
I mean, they've taken the work to put this in there. Is that just for fun or because they own it and they can, or is this really something that's coming?
Yeah. And they're going to start on PC only, but they're looking to add mobile and console and maybe beyond in months, years down the line. Excuse me. And it's free to try out. You can go to D&D Beyond right now and sign up to use it. Excuse me if you're a subscriber there.
Yeah, and they walked through the level builder. The footage looked a little sort of sped up to me, but it did show impressive pieces like a cargo lift and a mine that can lift, you know, your miniatures, creatures up. That all looked really cool. The visuals are amazing. But, you know, there's always that question of how easy to build things, right? You know, Dwarven Forge looks amazing, too.
And sometimes it's really easy, but some of their pieces are quite complicated to put together. And you approximate that Lego level of intensity, which... can be a lot of prep, right? So it'll be interesting to see how that really is when the open beta comes out where people are truly building things within seeing.
And they talked about sharing being important, integrating with D&D Beyond characters, pulling flat maps into the maps application or into here, and that idea that there might be a marketplace there, right? That's always interesting as to what exactly that would look like.
And there was a mention of using this not just for D&D. I thought that was hugely important because you can tell that they're really liking this, but they're still trying to figure out a way to monetize it. They're still trying to figure out how to recoup all of the development costs. And so... There is nothing stopping anyone from going on to here and running Pathfinder games.
There's nothing stopping people going on here and running any sort of games because it is literally a tabletop that you can do and build anything on. It won't be hooked in necessarily to a database to pull in roles or pull in other things, but it's there.
Yeah.
Yeah. We're going to switch to some non-D&D news just for a second, as it was reported that the Traveler role-playing game has been sold to Mongoose Publishing. So Mongoose had the license, I believe, to make Traveler content, but Traveler designer Mark W. Miller posted on Reddit to share the news that he had sold the rights to Traveler to Mongoose.
Fellow designer Greg Stafford, another person who had worked on Traveler, passed away, I think a few months ago, if not a couple of years ago. And Mark Miller wanted to ensure that the game would live on. So he sold it.
yeah and it's interesting he talked about you know sort of the the transition he's gone through of like sort of thinking about what it means when you kind of own a game or you're this big part of the game um that he and greg had worked on for so many years and he so he set up a relationship with mongoose and he works for them and works on the game through this you know license
But he wanted to set things in place that he is not the bottleneck and he is not the sole decider. And so he clearly enjoyed the relationship with Mongoose Publishing. And so now they own it. And while he continues to work on the game, nothing rests on him being around for it to work. And it was very mature, very, very savvy. very good of him. And so it's a nice read.
We linked it in our show notes because it's nice to kind of see, you know, someone think through that. And as we all get older, these are the kinds of things we have to think about for those of us in the old department.
Your story. NPR has a D&D series, several articles, including Dungeons, Dragons and Shoulder Bags. Why I loved D&D as a closeted teen. So tell me about this article and the others like it.
Yeah, it's really neat. The author shares in this piece how much D&D meant to them as a young person who found the game that helped them identify who they truly were, come out of the closet, right? When you look at a piece of artwork and you go, that guy looks absolutely spectacular. Maybe I'm finding something out about myself.
And being able to walk into someone else's shoes can be just a great way to figure that out. And I've had the fortune of talking to folks like in high schools who've talked to me about how important D&D was for these kinds of reasons, right? Figuring out who you are and you're polymorphing. And you realize that both you and this other person at the table, boy, we really like changing shape.
maybe there's something there to this. Right. And so you start finding that out and in a safe way to experiment with who you are and your gender, your your your your assumptions people have of what you should look like, all of that. Right. And so it's really neat. It's a nice article on that. And it's part of the overall
NPR series they've been doing to cover the 50th anniversary, which they were at PAX West. I had a lot of fun talking to the person who was there recording. They recorded a session of Union Hunt for the Lost Horn, which Jefferson Dunlap was running, and they interviewed DMs and fans.
So I'm excited to see what comes of that and what I can hear about it, because it was really neat to talk to them and see them there.
And in some not bad news, but interesting news, we wondered about Greg Tito, because for the longest time we hadn't heard from Greg. Greg worked for Wizards, I think since 2015, maybe 2016, 2017, around there. And he had many positions or many titles, including head of communication. And for the longest time, he co-hosted Dragon Talk, the Dragon Talk podcast. with our friend Shelley Mazzanoble.
And so Greg announced that he was leaving and I went, oh, that's too bad. Greg was a good egg and a good steward of the brand and really enthusiastic. And what was he leaving for? He is going to become Deputy Director of External Affairs, joining the staff of Washington Secretary of State, Steve Hobbs.
Now, Steve is obviously the Secretary of State for the state of Washington and a huge proponent of D&D and tabletop games. And he's been interviewed and he's talked publicly often about how important D&D and role-playing games and tabletop games in general are. And he's created programs. So I was like, okay, that's, That sounds good. Greg's probably communicated with him and good.
And then Greg had a quote and I was like, oh, Greg, that's so funny. Do you want to say it or shall I? I will bleep it. Greg said, it feels good to do something that doesn't just line the pockets of a-holes. And then later he added, sorry, I meant shareholders. And I was like, thank you, Greg. Thank you for saying it.
When you and I talk about Wizards and Hasbro as a publicly traded company, we always get accused of being apologetic to Wizards and to Hasbro. And when we say this is something that all businesses do, we're not apologizing to Hasbro and Wizards. We are saying, yes, this thing is terrible.
It should be called out as being terrible everywhere, across all industries, across all things, when horrible decisions are made because you are trying to please shareholders. So to have Greg say that
warmed the cockles of this cold uh heart yeah yeah because people are afraid to speak out right i think greg had clearly reached a point where he was so frustrated with where he was in the scheme of things which often i mean being in any kind of marketing communications area like that can be really really hard um But I'm really glad for him, right?
As someone who's talked to Greg a number of times in the past, I'm really glad to see him go to somewhere else. It's a really huge shame that it can't be within Wizards because that's where he'd like. But one of the things that was fun, we try to go behind to the sources whenever we can. Well, I hold here the seal of the Secretary of State of Washington State because...
He came by and visited the area while at PAX. Twice, in fact. And one of the times I'd given him one of the anniversary D20s. And he came by and thanked me for it. And then started just chatting with me and a couple of people who were around there about a number of things, including how happy he was to have Greg and that Greg had reached out saying, I want to make a difference.
Like, I want to not be in some... Situation that feels like you're part of a megacorp, but that I'm I'm paraphrasing, right? These are not this is not a quote, but, you know, a place where I'm contributing and I'm making a difference. And so I want to be part of, you know, this sector now and work with the government and try to make lives better.
And so that had meant a lot to Steve Hobbs to hear that. He also shared with me a number of funny things. I won't repeat all the words, but he definitely has a strong preference for, let's say, healthy YouTube content rather than alarmist content. And he shared that with us in a way that brought tears to my eyes and also an appreciation for him.
Uh, and just, yeah, it's clearly, you know, he's a big fan. He loves playing. He loves running games. Um, so it was really cool to have him there. And, and I think that, you know, it looks like Greg's in good hands, right. And in a good place. So, so happy for him for that. I did talk to a couple of staff members of, you know, Hey, what do you think about Greg having left?
And the general tenor was awesome.
sometimes people are in a rough spot and it doesn't it's not working out right that was kind of the feeling they had right it's not they didn't say to me yeah we all feel horrible right what is what they said was yeah and it's rough when one of us is in a spot that just is is butting heads and it's not working and and so we're really glad that you know while we're sad to see him go glad that he's in a place where he wants to be right
Well, on behalf of myself, Greg, if you hear this, thank you for all the work you put in and, you know, Godspeed in doing what you can in service to the government there.
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for making us laugh on the social media. Very true mention. Absolutely.
Absolutely. So now that we sit here, we're recording a day late. And so then we can report that the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook is now out at local gaming stores officially. D&D Beyond pre-orders should be going out officially. Mm-hmm. You should be able to, if you are a subscriber to D&D Beyond, access your 2024 players handbook there. I know I did. Yep.
You have to be a master tier subscriber, but in a week you'll get it if you're hero tier under their new kind of way of encouraging you to pay a little more monthly. Yep.
And even if you are not going to buy it, there will be free rules out that at least for a bit, to give you a view of those. There may be some technicalities there that I'm missing, as Teos already corrected me once. What do you know about this, Teos?
Yeah, so the version of the free rules, I did check today so that you can still see the 2014 rules, which I appreciate. I was a little worried that 2014 might go away and be replaced by, but no, you can see them, which is nice because you can easily compare them.
and one of the things the reason i was curious to compare it was what did they decide to include in the free rules compared to 20 of 24. so i checked feats because if my memory is correct the 2014 version has one feet and that's the case in the srd as well well and then i saw oh look we have several feats now in 2024 well that's great that's an improvement and then i saw the classes and i saw cleric fighter rogue wizard
and i thought wait a minute and i looked at the free 2014 rules and they have 12 classes right and everybody would complain why don't we have the artificer well now you don't have a warlock or a bard or a number of others so right you know hard to tell what this all means i i don't really mind this here
what the impact it has is when they release a 2024 srd as promised will this be the kind of difference that we see where they're saying yeah we're not giving you our bard at all in any form right
um and then that leaves you with a little bit of legal gray area as other companies have had of well can i make an artificer can i make a bard right an artificer is is you know an interesting writer warforged because those have general concepts and they have dnd concepts and digging into those dnd concepts is where you can run into ip challenges and so on so i didn't um you know we don't know what the srd will look like but i thought that was kind of interesting and worth you know starting up that discussion of hmm
Is this indicating some real change that we'll see?
I thought I read or saw somewhere that they are going to expand the 2024 free rules to include all of the classes, but I don't know where I saw that. It might depend on D&D Beyond, but maybe not.
Ah, one quick addition. You are absolutely right, Sean. I'm looking at D&D Beyond, and it does say, and I'll pull it over here,
when the pup players handbook sees its wide release on september 17th there will be a full release of the dnd free rules including remaining base classes uh blah blah blah blah warlock as well as one subclass for each class there will be more spells and feats so you're seeing a preview that's just kind of a placeholder which is kind of smart i like that and that we will be able to retain the 2014 rules as well so
I dig that. And then they just did do a quick note to say the free SRD rules are not the SRD, which you'd think you didn't have to say, but that has come up a lot. And that will be coming later once all three core rules are released, as they had said before.
Yeah. So at the soonest, we're looking for the SRD release in February of 2025. No surprise there.
The other thing I did note, you know, we now have the words of the player's handbook digitally. And on the show, we've often wondered about the superlative claims that this is the largest player's handbook ever, Sean. And we know the page counts higher, but we also know the font is bigger and the art is bigger.
And you and I have said, boy, it sure would be hard to increase the art, increase the font and fit it in the book. So early analysis indicates this player's handbook has. fewer words than the 2014 version. We knew it, Sean.
What can I say? Well... You know how I love art. No, you do not. A picture's worth a thousand words, apparently. So you have to take that into account. You have to do the math. You have to do the math. And last but not least, in our creator corner, you have noted that there is a free D&D 2024 quick reference sheet that has been created by a friend of ours.
Yeah. Tom Christie of D20 Play, who recently ran that awesome draw steal game for us, he has put together a reference sheet capturing the changes in 2024. So we've got links in our show notes. And that link hasn't worked for everybody. It did not work. Worked for me the first time I tried it, but it's on d20play.com and you can check it out.
Also, he has placed it on the DMs Guild because of that issue. So you can go pick it up there and see this free guide of what has changed. He does a nice job. There's a version that has sort of like blue line differences and stuff. So take a look at that. It's a nice little way of seeing what has changed.
With no further ado, we will get into our two main topics today, starting with our 2024 mini review, where rather than doing the deep dive into the 2024 Player's Handbook, we are going to pull out pieces and evaluate them on their own in a short amount of time each. This week, I thought we should look at the character creation chapter.
How does the book teach new players how to do a character and what do they emphasize? So the design goal, I think, for this should be is making character creation more streamlined to help the players understand how what they're doing when they create a character translates into gameplay. So they're not surprised. Would you say that's a good goal, Teos?
Yeah, absolutely. And it should be, right? I mean, I just finished a whole weekend of working with countless new players. I mean, we tried to count them. And it's complicated, right? And in fact, this came up on our Discord. Someone said, you know, what do you think about the new rules? And I said, well...
you know let's set that aside for a second and let's go back and say that for learn to play i have what i consider to be my favorite pregens to use for this event that we use when we do learn to plays and they're ones that almost look like the fourth edition pregens if anyone did the dnd encounters program they really streamline things because if we just give them a character sheet
it's really confusing. And so that tells you the mind of a new player, right? Too much is just super overwhelming. And so the more that you can distill it down, break it down step by step, right? Teach it a thing at a time. Like here's how to do skill stuff. Here's how to do combat stuff.
Here's how to, you know, the more you break that down, simplify it, give it in little bits that are digestible towards that emphasis of a new player, the easier it becomes for them.
It was a fun experiment when I worked on Peril and Pinebrook to try to make a character sheet as compact as possible, but not dense, and say, okay, what do they really, really need to know? Can I pull this out? Yeah, let's pull out ability scores. What else do they really not need? Okay, let's pull that out, pull that out, till I got down to a half page. and it's not a dense half page.
And so that's what I looked at with this going in was what do they emphasize? What do they say, but sort of gloss over, et cetera. So how did they handle it in 2014? Well, chapter one was called step-by-step characters. And so they gave a little segment about this is what you're doing when you build this part of the character.
And then they did so with a build Brunor subsection for each section where they showed you, okay, Brunor is going to be a dwarf. So what does that mean? Et cetera, et cetera. Just for reference, this 2014 chapter called Step-by-Step Characters was five pages long. We'll take that and set that aside and we'll look at 2024 in a minute. But what was in this chapter? There were six steps.
One was called Choose Your Race. You chose your race. Two, choose a class. You chose your class. Three, determine ability scores. Four, describe your character. I'll have you know, nowhere in this step does it mention backgrounds. Backgrounds is briefly mentioned in no great detail under the describe your character section. Even though mechanical rules were delivered via that background.
Five was choose your equipment and six was come together. Again, all of this handled five pages, including no small amount of art. Yeah.
2024 how does it handle it well the first thing is as we mentioned in our previous uh chapter here of of the show the designers have made a big deal about this is the first player's handbook that opens by teaching the game rather than having you make a character or describing the world or doing some other stuff it actually goes through the rules and
what rolling a d20 means and what checks mean etc etc uh so we don't even get to the creating your character uh section until chapter two and it's worth saying just for what it's worth right that that piece on uh the rules is 31 pages long
So it's not particularly long when you think of rules in general, right? That's a pretty reasonable read. And it's really hard for us, people like us who've been playing to properly assess that chapter. But I think it does a pretty good job of giving you what you need to know without getting mired in the details, which is accomplished by having a rules glossary. Right. Right.
It kind of gives you a high level view of the kind of things you're going to do. It has play examples. It has art and layout that kind of help you get that. The whole point that when you get to chapter two on page thirty three, now you're going to know what you're even talking about versus before creating a character with sort of an interesting opening because it said.
here are these, you're gonna choose a race, and you don't even know what they're talking about if this is your first time reading D&D, and you're gonna have to go to the race section later to even figure out what the options are and choose and go back and forth. And so it's an interesting change.
Yeah, and no matter what order you put the content in, there's going to be some sorts of jumping around. You can't avoid that. But I was happy to see this change
rule section come first for the reason that you just said at least you have an understanding of the basics so when you're making decisions about your character you have a frame of reference yeah you won't know everything but you'll you'll have a frame of reference uh so we get to the chapter two then uh creating your character the very first thing it talks about is get ready
It doesn't say choose class, choose race. It says get ready. And there are subheadings under get ready. And the first one is talk to your DM. And I'm like, yes, thank you. It reinforces for players that this game relies on game masters who are going to be the interpreters and the storytellers and the facilitators. So get to know the DM first because they can help you.
along the way and they may have further instructions along the way so i i really i really like that and i think it helps dms as well by putting dms in the driver's seat and saying dm this is a responsibility and a joy so treat it as both treat it as both of those things yeah and they don't
go super deep here right so they mentioned like you may choose a different direction for your character if the dm is planning swashbuckling versus high c or swashbuckling high c's and versus greek myth i guess and um
so yeah totally right but also they don't say things like your dm might limit what options you can take or your dm may you know want you to start in a certain type of city they don't go deep on this right just a light bit which is fine to give you a feel for your dm has a say and affects things they also talk about the session zero
and that you may get together to do things like talk about do's and don'ts in the campaign and so on. And so that's, again, another thing that doesn't cover all of the possibilities, but at least helps prepare the mind of a new player for, oh, yeah, my DM matters, the campaign matters, and that's on.
And then what I hope is in the DM's guide is a matching section I'm sure they won't, but it would be nice if there was a matching list that says, okay, DM says your players create characters. Here are some things you might want to talk to them about. When they come to you before they create their character, here's how you can handle things.
When you talk about session zero, here are some things you can do. When they're choosing a class, here are some things you could think about. That would... That would take too much coordination, but it would be helpful if there was at least some sort of correlation. So step one, choose your class. If we go back to 2014, what was the first step? Choose your race. So already, I'm very happy.
We have flipped the script and said, hey, player, the class is the most important thing you're going to choose. So step one, choose your class. Step two, determine origin. Now, what does origin mean? Origin means four things according to this step. It means your background. which they actually will set aside now and talk more about.
Your starting equipment, which should come from your class and your background, so it flows in order. Your species, which now is like behind class, background, and starting equipment, And finally your languages, which will depend on the things that we've already talked about. So it does follow a more logical flow. And I like how they sort of de-emphasize species.
I know that for world building purposes, for role-playing purposes, it might be important to a lot of people, but if we are going to say species doesn't matter in terms of rules, it belongs in that place for this particular purpose. Then later you can say, species may be the most important thing about your world if there are rigid kingdoms or rigid nations that are based on species.
But if it's not, and we're trying to de-emphasize that species doesn't mean as much, then let species not mean as much. Does that make sense?
It does. I fight it. I struggle with it. I think because just, I mean, from the simple perspective, when I create a character, I always think of that, right? So I just think of like, well, I want to make, you know, orc monk or whatever it is, you know, and that's how my brain always approaches it. And I think most video games reflect that as well, right?
Like, you know, you choose to make a dwarf and then, oh, what class is your dwarf and so on.
um because it it colors the whole experience right like you can think of the video game right if it if it said like make a a class we wouldn't have anything to look at because it'd be a nebulous concept out there and then we'd be like and what's your background oh you're a sailor and then it would be like and now let's have finally have a visual of this you know whatever it is a half elf of halfling uh whatever right like
Yeah. And, and I think, I don't want to say like, old school mindset. But it is, it is an old school mindset, right? It's a mindset of what you look like matters. And where we're going, hopefully, as a society, what you look like doesn't matter. It's what you do. It's who you are on the inside, Teos. It's the magic that's inside of you that's important. And so I totally get that looks matter.
I totally get that for cognitive purposes, but for storytelling purposes and for purposes of what you do in the world, I think there is a movement to de-emphasize that, not to eliminate it, but to de-emphasize it.
Yeah, and I get that. And we don't want to be mired in the real world's place where it definitely matters how you look and then your life is different for it. So we don't want to be mired in that. But also part of the problem is that this D&D doesn't know how to separate culture from what you look like, what your anatomy is.
It also doesn't know how to deal with being an incredibly different physique from another and how that impacts things, right? I mean, that was all what the game was trying to simplify before. And now we're saying it completely doesn't exist, but also that it's not part of your concept of who you are. And I struggle with that.
It is a part of the concept of VR, which is why it's still in the game. You still do pick your species. And that's why with Aurora, I want to get rid of that concept for story reasons, but also for the fact that pick what you're made of
trait wise but don't tie it to this idea that because you are an elf you have to be this way because you are a dwarf you have to be this way yeah yeah i um i mean you know i don't i don't we could go on this forever right because it is such a deep thing from the the perspective of really the order of creating things for me i don't know that i'm i'm i'm making characters where
it's a final step, right? And I don't, I have trouble believing I'll, I will approach it that way mentally. Because I do want to be part of the setting. And to me, that's a big part of it. It's part of how I will shape the personality I have is based on the fact that I'm a dwarven Smith or my whatever, I'm not just a Smith. And then all of a sudden, oh, And I'm a dwarven smith.
I've discovered this. To me, it's a far more integral piece that's going on and that I think about it. But, you know, I've talked to other folks who say like, you know, the first thing I'm thinking of is I'm making a barbarian. And then later I figure out what kind. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, and I get why they do it. Part of it is what you're talking about.
But part of it is also because they have moved all of these items to the background. then the mechanical weight is no longer on the species. And that means it should come later because it's not necessarily driving these things. And we still have, I mean, like if you look at 2014, it kind of makes sense mechanically, right?
You choose the race, which locks in certain things like ability score bonuses, whatever, right? Right. and various features and weapons that you're proficient in and so on. And then you get the class and that fills out the rest of them. And then we do our final ability score thing so we can fill out the rest of the character sheet. Right.
And you add a background on it because that's sort of just an extra little nice thing. Now we have to go and say, all right, you're choosing your class because that's now the highest concept we will go for, because if we didn't, we'd be really messed up. Right. So then we've then we go to our background and our background is going to add feats and all of this. But to me,
I still don't quite jive with that, right? And maybe I will. But to me, we're saying too much about our character without knowing enough. Like, I don't feel like it lines up in the right way, except mechanically, right? To me, mechanically, sure, you're trying to say like, oh, here are your ability scores. So we got them through the background. So that's got to move up in order and so on.
But yeah, to me, it's not narratively in the order that I want it in.
Yeah. Yeah, I can understand why. Well, speaking of ability score, step three is determined ability score. And as we have this succession, I'm like, no, I want this to be step two now. I want step one, choose your class. Step two, these are the ability scores you want to take. Then step three, the other stuff. But since it's there, they give us the three ways you can do them now.
Standard array, random generation, or point cost, it used to be point by.
uh and shame on wizards for being the cowards not to put the axe to ability scores and not just use modifiers uh but yeah that's just my my little personal hot take there i was watching a video with with the designers of uh third edition and they're talking about how close they came to remove it i think it was something monty cook wanted to do and some of the others and you know at the end of it they just couldn't do it way back then right and we just we keep going forward
Probably one edition will eventually do it, but it's not this one. There's still sort of too much out there that they're thinking of. And yeah.
And we also get a standard array chart by class. So standard array by class chart, which says if you're a barbarian, these are what you should take. You don't have to, but you will be okay. You won't be handicapping your...
most powerful abilities if you do this and i like that i think it's pretty clear for players especially new players to say all right i just want to make a character i don't want to deal with rolling dice or point buys or anything i'm just going to do this and then the next step of course is choose your ability modifier so once you know your score the chart only goes to 20.
And I guess that makes sense in the fact that you're not going to have a higher number than that. At this time, yeah. At this time, but it will go up probably later. So I thought that was strange that the chart ended there.
And one of my friends this weekend was noting that they also state that 30 is truly the cap, which was a little unclear from the way 2014 talked about things. Now you know that. Yeah.
Then it says, describe your appearance and personality. And it's odd to me that you put that there. And I guess it's got to be put somewhere. So there it goes. But then following that, we get a bunch of charts that show...
roll a d4 if you have a high strength and that will describe your character so if you have a high strength and you roll a d4 you could be muscular sinewy protective or direct i'm like can you not be direct or protective if you're not strong and and so this just
wet and just a weird weird way for me it's and it's like what i'm saying about species it's like don't don't let species tell you who you are don't let your ability scores tell you your personality or your sure if you have a high strength you might look muscular totally totally reasonable and and this is also devoid of culture right this which is to me a giant mistake here because it's
you can envision a lot of species that would tend to live in cultures, depending on the world and the setting, where these things would not be true, right? I can imagine elves not thinking that you're protective when you're muscular or whatever, you know, like when you're high strength, like, in fact, it could be very, you're protective when you are intelligent, right?
Would make more sense to me for your typical elven setting, right? And Yeah, and it's just, hmm.
Yeah, it sort of goes in a different direction than I want the game to go. Is it horrible? No. But it just doesn't do all that much for me, and I don't think it helps a player. Let the rules, teach the rules here. Don't try to tell the player how to play their character.
I feel like I've been better attempts in the past to sort of say, what does a score signify that has said sort of, you know, it doesn't just mean this one thing. It can mean a number of things. It's sort of like charisma is a classic example. It doesn't mean that you're just
physically attractive you know it's not about whether you're a pinup it's all these other factors that help you inspire attention lead people get someone's ear right those kinds of things and and same thing with intelligence or any of these abilities and and so
that to me is more useful that could shape you thinking about what your what your ability scores mean to you than to state you know yeah this table driven by strength or what any ability being low or high yeah
And then we get to the point, step four, where I just start banging my head on the desk. And if I was jokingly saying, oh, you cowards for not getting rid of ability scores, step four, choose an alignment. I just went, why? why there's so many better ways to tell you who your character is. And yeah, we've been around and around and around on this.
Because they're memes and it's part of the parlance.
Yeah, exactly.
Honestly, I think alignment came up in humorous conversations a dozen times this weekend, right? So it has that import, maybe even more so than ability scores, where we used to laugh more about, you know, I've got an 18 strength, this is my dump stat. I mean, alignment comes up a lot in talk.
And so I think there's just that fear of cutting out something that has, but it really has separated, right? There's the game part of it, and there's this other piece. What I would love to do is to have wizards put in the effort to try to make this mean something in today's game. Or then, yes, if you're not going to do that, then cut it, right?
And like we've talked about before, I would have loved if Dragonlance had said, you know what, we're going to really dig into what alignment can do for a game. Then it may be worth retaining, right? Or if you're going to show me how to link in, use your alignment to create cool stories, that'd be great. But if you're a new player and you just look, these two steps are rocky, right?
The ability score, appearance, personality piece, and the alignment piece are... rocky for a player when the game no longer uses this in any way. Right.
Yep. So I will, if I start talking in the third person, you know, I'm upset. So Sean, Sean's just going to leave step four out of character creation that doesn't exist.
Well, it's like, and at the end, to make it even worse, we, I'll say this so you don't have to, there is a table that on based on your alignment, then you get associated traits, right? So that a rebellious person can be a result from chaotic or helpful come from, come from good. And I don't know how helpful this is. This is... Yep. Yeah.
Yep. Because lawful people are never greedy, apparently. Okay. Yeah. So step five, fill in the details. And this is where you've made your smaller choices or your bigger choices. Now go back and fill in your class features.
fill in your saving throws skills passive perception hit points hit point dice not hit dice hit point dice armor class attacks spell slots good i i like that i like the make these quick choices they're big but they're quick now go back and don't worry about the details until you get the rest of it okay here you go and then give your name and the final details
I like how the hit point dice very quickly switches to saying hit dice because they're just too darn long. Yeah. So the other thing that's worth noting is that we get this, you know, kind of never before seen picture of a character sheet. Right. And it's all numbered, which tracks to these steps. And there are a lot of fives here. Right.
Because at the end is when you fill out like all of your spells and, you know, your spell slots and your weapons and your class features and, you know, all this you end up filling out later. So it's a little. You know, I don't know how useful it is. It's maybe somewhat so for folks to look at where, you know, like, okay, your coins come from step two and, you know.
Yeah.
Your wisdom comes from step three and so on. Okay.
I almost feel like we need a separate episode where we look at the character sheet from 2014 and really go through it and do a. That's cool. I like that. Do an inventory. Yeah. And so that's pretty much it. That's the chapter. There is a little bit on like gender and they get rid of the term like bonds, flaws, ideals, and goals, but they put that in as final details.
So they ask questions like, what do you believe in? What are you trying to do? Who is important to you? So they get there. They just don't call it those things.
Which is fine. I mean, I think that... What I guess, you know, what's interesting is that they've given up on trying to have some sort of a system there that drives role playing. Right. So the inspiration bond flaws, et cetera.
I mean, they were too much and they were didn't quite work, but it was an attempt to try to emulate indie games and have pieces there that would foster, like get you, encourage you to do something interesting. And I will say that when I look at this process, I don't see a whole lot. That really drives. creating an interesting character. Not that it's not possible.
Of course it is, you know, and there's some, there's, but it's not saying as some other, you know, 13th age, we've talked about the, what is your one unique thing? You know, what faction are you aligned with? You know, what enmity do you have in the world? Like there's, there's nothing going on like that here, right?
It's, it's very D and D and it's sort of like, and now you have a character and it's up to play to determine how this pans out and whether you're a good role player or not.
I don't think 2014 did any other than codifying those four traits. They didn't do really much either.
I think that was their attempt. It was definitely an attempt. They thought, hey, maybe when people fill this out, it'll create creative, neat play, which is good. It may be a lousy system, but I think it... It probably did cause people to think about that, right? Because it's right there. You got to look at like, oh yeah, what are my personality things?
And you might abandon them, but at least you understand that because you read this, all characters have desires and goals and whatever. And you might not use the ones you wrote down, but you'll maybe play a little more that way. Here, you kind of don't have that, right?
And what I would like to see then, you're absolutely right, what I would like to see then is in the Dungeon Master's Guide, have it say, listen, in your campaign, maybe bonds don't mean much. but ideals and goals are going to be highly important. So do that during character creation.
Maybe you're going to run a game where you want every character to have a bond and that bond will become important. So do bonds, but don't worry so much about ideals. Ideals will come out during play. So to keep it in front of the game master, but don't have it so the player makes it and it's never used. That would be nice if they did that.
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if the DMG touches on that in some way, because it could be campaign specific, but yeah.
So that's it. There's a little bit on level advancement, starting higher levels, trinkets, et cetera. But for the most part, that is the character creation section. And I am fairly pleased with it, despite the couple of melodramatic turns I took. I think it's okay.
yeah well yeah this ties into our earlier conversation about packs right there's there you can look at things through various parts of like i don't know lenses right yeah you can look at through a design analysis you can look at it through you know what i want out of a game as we did briefly with we had a race species type contrast um but at the end of the day this is absolutely uh
you know, two chapters, both the setup and then the actual character creation. And I think people really dig. And overall, if I think of all the people I met at PAX, they'll have a blast making cool characters of this process.
Yep. I agree. And now let's get to our other main topic, which is the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, which we have been very carefully working our way through to talk about Greyhawk as a setting, what it means that Greyhawk was put into the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide as an example world, and just sort of sharing our love for Greyhawk as we go through that living Greyhawk as a tier.
And we've been doing the regions and we've gotten as far as the North Kingdom, and that's where we will start today. You're going to hear us talk more about certain themes that have come up in other regions. And so we will try not to dwell too much on them. We will mention them and say, go listen to the previous episodes.
uh where we go a little bit further into why this may be great or this may not be perfect for a uh setting in our 21st century yeah i mean absolutely right we start with the north kingdom and the first thing reading through all this description that i've hit was oh yeah here we go another monarchy another you know uh history of like this having been a part of an earlier kingdom. Right.
And in this case, it's part of the the old great kingdom. And this is the north part, which, by the way, the north kingdom is to the east. But it's the northern part of what used to be that large great kingdom. And so that's why it's called that, even though it's really like it's just all on the eastern side, kind of near those islands that we talked about last episode. Right.
And yeah, what do you think about North Kingdom?
Yeah, exactly what you said. The first thing is independent feudal monarchy. Okay, eye roll. With strong theocratic elements. Okay, eye roll. And in a setting where the gods are known to exist and manifest themselves in very tangible ways, I get it.
Having a kingdom that is subservient to an evil deity will be different than having a nation subservient to a good deity, which will be different than a chaotic deity, which will be different than all that. So I can understand that you can have some fun with that juxtaposition. but it doesn't always work itself out to be as fun during play as it sounds during writing it as a world.
Yeah, and this is another difference between Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms is that Greyhawk, the gods are way more involved and the religions are there for a stronger presence and smash into each other more, right? Yes, religion is important in Forgotten Realms, but the gods, other than during the times of troubles, don't just really put their hand into it the way they do in Greyhawk.
And so you don't see it. And Greyhawk is also setting written during this from a perspective of kind of a simulationist world that's very real. And so because it is, it therefore must be fully described. Right. So the army matters. So it must be fully described. And the theocracy matters and the history of the rulers. And that's bunk.
Yeah, of course, you can just say it matters, but you don't have to detail it all out and endlessly talk about it. And what it does, at the end of the day, that I think you and I have been talking about, is it means this is a fairly decently large section that doesn't really give you a lot to go with, right? Yep.
And the most important thing to me to note is It is a realm that serves the god Hextor, who is sort of the Bane in the Forgotten Realms. Wait, is Bane in the Forgotten Realms? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I sometimes mix them up. So, you know, it's like tyranny and might over all who are weaker than you sort of thing. So you can play around with that a bit. And it's really part of... It's the...
juxtaposition of there are two main kingdoms that came out of the Greek kingdom. There was this North kingdom and then there was Alyssa and neither one of them are great. Neither one of them are perfect, but they're sort of at war with each, not physically at war, but tension between the two of them. Who is the real, um,
heir to the glory that was the great kingdom so you can play around with that a little bit but even then it's just put me in front of giants and dragons and let me let me kill them is where my mind keeps going yeah the the this setting and that's where i feel like this was written as a oh you know this is the historical truth and we must write about it and represent it versus thinking like players want to do much with this do dms want to do much with this if not
Let's either keep it really short for those tiny moments when this will work, like you've got to go into there to recover this lost artifact from the fallen empire, or just let's write something else here.
And we've said before that I love this Living Greyhound Gazetteer as a guidebook to someone who is going to be doing a living campaign. And they need that history to... to give them a little spice to the adventures and to the things they're working on. But just for an individual game master, there are going to be people that love it.
There are going to be a lot of people who were like me as a history major in college going, as I read in my head, I was literally doing it with this book. I'm like, and then, and then see why three 82, the, the, the, and like, my eyes are fluttering and I'm like, oh, I've got to get through this. I've got to get through this.
Our next region, Nairon, I felt was a little bit like this as well. But I felt like it had some like saving bits that made it more interesting. Right. It's almost like how to take the previous one and give it a little more to it. Right. Because, yes, it has all these tensions.
But to me, the history of kind of why it is where it is makes it more more interesting with and the monarchy's issues are more interesting. What do you think? Right.
Yeah, for sure. The monarchy has its own problems. It was a part, of course, of the Great Kingdom, because who wasn't?
It's just west of the North Kingdom.
And so it has an interesting history of one of those areas that are on the edge of a very powerful empire. So they get lots of troops sent there as the guardians of the edge of the empire. And then as the empire begins to crumble, it's one of the first places to go. So that part, I was like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. I could see that. And then because it was so involved in the Greyhawk Wars,
They lost 70,000 soldiers. So just a few years ago, they lost 70,000 soldiers. And so they are in dire circumstances. Economically, they are ruined. Banditry is rampant. And a new king has just come to power after his younger brother tried to assassinate their father. And there's a picture of the new king and the old king. Tejas is holding up.
And so at least that is interesting in a way that this is a quote unquote good kingdom. It's the leaders are at least trying to do right, but everything's falling apart. So there is more room for player characters to come in and make a difference.
Yeah. And what I like, you know, and I wish they'd, they'd made this like, sometimes I feel like this sometimes because it tries to be encyclopedic, doesn't tell the DM, just, just tell the DM, Hey, here's some awesome questions. Right. Right. Yeah.
And like, so one of them is the young, a younger brother tries to take over the moment that a, a, there's a sudden stroke to the older father, but was that magical mundane? Yeah.
you know that begs the question becomes really interesting and then it's like oh you know the the older brother regains the power the younger brother disappears wait a minute where is he right something's going on and then oh so the young the older brother gets married and immediately the wife has a sickness and she's never been seen since after heat stroke and it's like
those are all juicy bits that you just sort of hid in all of this googly gook about history bring those right out front and tell me that's the cool stuff to work around right right now now the characters can get involved they need to track down the the younger brother they need to figure out what malady what curse has been put on you know
the the the the patrol of the king and that now i'm telling a story now i'm now i'm ready now now i'm getting my juices flowing in terms of creativity and a story that the characters can take part in yeah
And one other thing is, is sometimes they, you know, they don't point out like I remember the fourth edition Forgotten Realms guide. One of the things I really liked about it is it would take these little snapshots that it would use for the picture in each section.
And it would that is both visually grounding and it would help you imagine like, oh, there's this forest and this marsh and this thing and this coastline, because those are all the adventure sites. And it would give you little tidbits about them. And a more modern version of this is the Critical Role, both of the Critical Role setting books do a great job of doing that, right?
Of showing you, hey, all these cool features, if you base your campaign here, you'll want to do this, right? And here are hooks at both low level and high level because that stuff's awesome, right? Like you want to... How can it not matter that Realm War Bay is to the south of Nairon? But we don't mention it because... You're just supposed to look at the map and conclude.
But if you're really going to write fun things for the setting, well, then you want to know that.
We're doing the Grim Hollow transformed redo of our setting. And I sent out a couple weeks ago to our writers, here is the regional outline. And a big honking part of that is... adventure sites or sites of interest or places to adventure or adventure hooks.
Not, not like two lines at the end of it, like half of them, because that's what our game masters and our players are most likely want to focus on. And if you like history and if you like that sort of thing, we're not disparaging you. It's, it's, it's fun. It can be a lot of fun to delve into that, but it's not for everyone. Totally. Absolutely.
And speaking of that, let's get to Anwar, which is, guess what, a hereditary feudal monarchy. But at least in this case, the actual government was a hereditary feudal monarchy, but the Scarlet Brotherhood took over. And the Scarlet Brotherhood owned an important part of this region, which is the capital and its surrounding area.
which is on the very edge of this peninsula that that acts as a sort of Gibraltar port portal into a larger ocean or sea slash bay. Yeah. So the the rest of the country is run by the rebels who are trying to overthrow the Scarlet Brotherhood's rule over the capital city of Scant and its environs.
And so there you've got, it's a shorter regional write-up, but it's at least got this story that I could latch onto and hurl my adventures into.
yeah um and and i think this was a region that did really well because of that i i was fortunate to play a few of these uh adventures which were written in the uk um and they were fun and they were neat and there were big scenes involving the scarlet brotherhood as these enemies there was a lot of subterfuge because of how the scarlet brother had those the spy network and everything but and there was a lot of like unify the people and um you know deal with the people who try to profit from war and so on and so
It was pretty neat. They could see what they needed to do, right? This is an area of the world that's very clear, has neat agency, neat, obvious action going on. And so, yeah, it was it was a good region. Yeah.
I agree. And it was very near the Pomarge, which is sort of the other side of that rock or the Strait of Gibraltar. And that is also an area overrun with monsters or monstrous humanoids. So having those two things blocking off this one small strait into a larger sea
is is a good story it's a good setup for especially naval adventures but also adventures to get in and free that area so ships can get through
Yeah, and that's where you can think, like, if you're really going to make this useful, you've got to address that, that, hey, you're a little far away from everything else. So, you know, what's under the waves, right? Things like that. What's, you know, a place like this would be really impacted by weather and climate and shipping routes.
And so, you know, a little more there would help you then also make that an interesting setting for players.
And we'll do one more region, because we're running low on time, and this last region is called the Theocracy of the Pale. And it is a theocracy that is ministered not by the Church of Hextor, but by the Church of Foltus.
Totally different.
Yes and no, right? It is, but it isn't, because Foltus is the god of light. So it's like, oh, okay, finally, a good church, but not so fast. And this is another problem where I have alignment coming in and telling me what's what when what is not what. So it's called a lawful neutral world because the god Voltus is lawful neutral, but supposedly good. But there's this one sect that is sort of...
yes we're good and you need to do the following things to be good and the following things are do everything we say yeah big time and since and since it's not a monstrous deity since it's not since it's not i use telling you what how to live it's lawful neutral rather than lawful evil but they're still telling you exactly how to live yeah or Which, in my book, is lawful evil.
And killing you if you do it wrong. Right, and killing you if you do it wrong. That's lawful evil. And so, right there, just get rid of alignment. But, again, this is another nation that was part of the Great Kingdom. And it's interesting because it was the priests of Foltus administered the law and the judges of the Great Kingdom in this sense. So...
people were sent there, judges were sent there, lawyers, if you will, were sent there to learn the law, to learn how to administer the law. And then when the leaders of the Great Kingdom decided that these priests of Foltus were maybe a little bit of a pain, we're going to switch over to the priest of Xilchus, the god of commerce, to be the the administer of justice.
Well, the priest of Foltus decided, well, we don't need to be a part of the great kingdom anymore, so we shall rebel. And so now they have their very own theocracy And I wouldn't call it a fun place to live.
No. This region was in Northern California and Nevada. And it was one of those regions that was hilarious to either visit or have their players visit your region because they would come in And they may either be like anti-Fultites or often they were they would role play being strict Fultites. And so they would be like, you must acknowledge Fultas of the blinding light.
And everybody just rolls their eyes like, oh, we've got a Fulton at the table. Right. Like, oh, my God. And and there was a lot of humor in that. Right. But also in character, it was very serious. And and yeah. And if you had ventured there, you had to be careful what you did or said. And you had to understand and quickly come up to speed on the rules so that you didn't run into trouble.
And there was a lot of burning at the stake and stuff like that.
Yeah. Which is fine if it's a campaign you want to play in.
Right.
It's not fine if it's the campaign you have to play in. Yeah. And so, yeah, this would be a place, a good place for the characters to visit, but they would not want to live there.
Yeah, and that's such an interesting thing. I mean, you could almost apply that lens when you're when you're creating a world of what are places that we visit and don't stay in and what are places that we might start and stay in home base and right like, yeah, you wouldn't want to stay in under the watchful gaze of old dates for long.
Yeah, and that's where we're going to end.
right so sean had to head out because of another meeting he had for a design meeting so i want to thank all of our masters of the realms our master of multiverse and master of dungeon supporters master dungeon supporters we greatly appreciate you master of realms you are in our show notes And Master of the Multiverse, you get this shout out. Shout out? Shout out. See, this is why Sean does it.
Keith Amman of the Monsters Know What They're Doing. Lou Anders of Lazy Wolf Studios. Craig Bailey. David Bastionson. Steve Bissonnette. Merrick Blackman, Calvin Bridges, Avalos, Evil John, John Carney, Will Doyle, Andy Edmonds at Nerdronomicon.com, James Fisher, Scott Fitzgerald Gray at Insane Angel Studios, Ben Hazler, and Paige Leitman.
Sean Hurst, The Mighty Jerd, Brian King, Jim Klingler, aka DM Prime Mover, Chad Lynch, Paul Matta, The Mathemagician, Eric Mengi, Anna B. Meyer of Fantasy Cartography, Trey McLemore,
John Mickey, Sean Molly, Falcon Neil, Tom Nelson of the Deck of Players Safety, Mighty Zeus, Phil Wirt from the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo, welcome, Post Fiction RPG Audio, Robert Paslick, great seeing you this weekend at PAX, Vladimir Printer from Croatia, Pugnus,
Ozzy Mandis Rex, Chance Russo at Drago Russo, Andy Shockney, Krishna Simons, Josh and Levanica of the Tabletop Journeys podcast, Talos the Storelord, Jeremy Taloman from the D&D and TV podcast, Tres, Joe Tyler, Marcelo de Velasquez, the Valiant DM, James Walton, Graham Ward, Jason Ward from Accidental Cyclops Games, Javier Wasiak, Chris Webster, and Walt Winfrey. Thank you all.
You can join these fine folks at patreon.com slash mastering D&D. And when you do, you'll be part of our community on Discord. Love that group there. If you can give us a review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to the podcast that helps other folks find us. And subscribe via YouTube, youtube.com slash at Mastering Dungeons.
And you will get to see our beautiful faces and help folks find us there. You can find Sean at all the places at Sean Merwin. You can find me at alphastream.org. And what are we going to do now? Well, I think I'm going to craft a setting where the first thing you do is choose your alignment and then you choose your species. I think Sean will really like that. I can't wait to show him this.
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