Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk
323 | Diving into the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide: Insights and Analysis With Mike Shea
Fri, 08 Nov 2024
Join Russ, PJ Coffey from the Southampton Guild Roleplayers, and Jessica from EN Publishing, along with special guest Mike Shea, as they delve into the newly released 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. This week's episode focuses on a comprehensive analysis of the guide, highlighting its strengths, areas for improvement, and its potential impact on both new and seasoned Dungeon Masters. Mike Shea provides his firsthand experience with the guide, sharing insights on the book's organization, the inclusion of essential tools, and its approach to aiding Dungeon Masters in running engaging campaigns. The discussion also touches on the practical aspects of adventure creation and the inclusion of Bastions as a new game feature. In addition to the core topic, the episode briefly covers the latest tabletop RPG news, including the 10th anniversary of the Era: The Consortium, Blades in the Dark's new expansion, and Critical Role's Christmas album. The hosts also discuss the implications of Apple's new Patreon policy and Twitch's updated content guidelines.
All the Tabletop are outplaying us.
Ha!
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to Morris' unofficial tabletop RPG talk. I am Russ, a.k.a. Morris, or Morris, a.k.a. Russ, and with me this week is... PJ Coffey from the Southampton Guild Roleplayers.
Russ, as ever, I am delighted to be here. Joining us, as ever, we have the wonderful and erudite, and indeed, extremely talented, it's the one, it's the only, it's...
me jessica from em publishing that was that was quite a nice intro thank you very much but i am not alone pj you have someone else to introduce very true and in the words of the late great benny mays
more we have some people know him as Slifer others know him as Mike Shea I just know him as this cool guy who lives in a little box on my phone apparently now in my computer it's the one it's Mike Shea fantastic nose hey hello it's always a great back again back again I don't know how we keep getting you on because I love to talk and every invitation I get
Fair enough.
Relatable, relatable.
Everyone else in the podcast now is like, oh, really? Okay, let's do that.
Yeah, it's a big surprise, I'm sure.
Well, luckily you're on a podcast which is explicitly designed for exactly that one thing.
Marvelous, marvelous.
Amazing. Right, so this is a really, really, really, really quiet week for news this week. So we'll cover the news in about seven seconds.
For Tabletop RPG.
Tabletop RPG, yes, obviously, in the world.
I think we're just past all the other news going on here.
And we won't be talking about that here, but that's probably why it's been a light RPG news week, because there's been stuff going on.
Absolutely. If you're listening to this, years in the future, this podcast was made in the week of the 5th, 6th of November, 2024. So maybe Google that if you're wondering why we're talking about this. Anyway, moving on.
yeah so yeah so the majority of this show we're going to be talking about dnd 2024 and in particular the dungeon master's guide the 2024 dungeon master's guide so we'll be talking about that a lot but before we do that let's quickly get the seven seconds of news out of the way shall we i might be able to do a little bit more than seven seconds i picked up some bits and pieces you know maybe you just talk really slowly that will spin it out a little bit
And today in the Tabletop RPG.
Yes, what was that, your David Attenborough impression?
No, I can do a better one than that, but I'll save that for another one. That was pretty good. Thank you.
Here we are.
I met David Attenborough.
Did you? Yeah. Oh, cool.
I ran an event for him and not just for him. It wasn't like his, but anyway, it was for the Wildlife Trust and he came in and saw me and it went very good. And either he was hitting on me or he was happy with the event. Either way, I'm delighted. So that's my, and that's one of my claim to fame.
Was that just very good?
What more do you want, Russ? Have you got better than a very good friend?
It's like 130.
This was like 15 years ago.
Not put too much stress on him.
This was about 15 years ago.
Only 115 back then.
Do you know what? Still spry.
Still spry. I have a wild idea. What? Why don't we talk about some TTRPG news? Go on then.
I'm fine, DJ. What do you got for us?
Why don't you start?
I thought my anecdote was great, but yeah, fine.
It's a great anecdote, and I very much appreciate it. I like it, Jessica. Thank you. It was a good anecdote. There you go. You can add more things like that. Anyway, so, yeah, so exciting news. One of the more interesting sci-fi settings that isn't a massive IP license, Eroda Consortium is enjoying its 10th anniversary.
There is a large number of reasons why you might be excited about this setting, from its taken colonialism, its disability rep, But Edge Hour and Shades of Vengeance are doing a 10th anniversary Kickstarter. It's 16 days ago, and they've done 2,400 of, it's about $3,800 goals. So, you know, looks like they'll be getting through. I'm definitely looking forward to backing it.
You'll get the rulebook and up to three...
three free expansions when it's funded and potentially more from stretch goals so so yes we have mentioned this game on the show before but for those that don't recall could you quickly sort of summarize what is era the consortium era consortium is a science fiction role-playing game it uses d10 dice pool so if you're familiar with white wolf games and so forth then
you are very much in the right sort of uh area uh it has a wide variety of cross compatibility with other genres which yeah i i know rush from all the d6 dice ball rather than d10 dice ball but yeah i'm kind of going off d6s actually yeah yeah no d10 not a platyponic solid but still pretty cool i think um
uh yeah and what can we say about the setting humans go to a strange far-off system and there is much bickering and part of the excitement for it is you can play as either the consortium which is essentially hyper mega corporations or there's a resistance to it sometimes you can even mix the parties and the integration of the
different viewpoints of the world is part of the charm of the setting, in my opinion. And there's a variety of Baelin races, tree people and people and little squids that live inside human mecha suits and wander around so they can take part in a... And this isn't just a game, is it? It's also comics and all sorts of things. Oh, goodness. Yeah, there's comics.
I believe there's some paperback novels and also some, they're not radio plays, actual plays, recordings, podcast recordings. I don't know what to call them. Media. There's media, audio media.
which you can listen to and enjoy as well so there's really quite a family and certainly if you've been to any of several UK conventions you will probably have seen it signed up that the option to sign up for various era games yeah I'm a consortium person I do enjoy it a lot also era ballon which is space above and beyond but is a much simpler and kind of fun starship fighter thing so yeah there's a lot to be said for these various games
Yeah, absolutely. The area games as well, if that setting doesn't suit you, they use the system for a variety of different settings. It's kind of, it reminded me a bit of a toolbox of RPG because they've used it for every setting you can kind of think of where you could easily hack your own with it. And also they were, we've had Ed on the Not D&D show where we talked about the game for 40 minutes.
So if that brief intro was interesting to you, then there's a whole episode of Not D&D talking about the game specifically. So if you want to hear more about it.
Is this a cross promotion that I've heard about?
Yes. How about that? How about that? Yeah, that's awesome. But the Kickstarter's live now, did you say?
Yeah, yes, it's ongoing.
Excellent.
Jess, were you going to talk about Blades in the Dark?
I was. What a good segue. So, yes, the piece of news we have this week. So, Blades in the Dark has an official expansion. So, obviously, Blades in the Dark is the RPG, and loads of people have done third-party stuff, so you can find loads of games using this system. But this is an official one by the creator, John Harper. So, it adds new factions. It's got new mechanics.
It's got background options. So, it's a setting and also system expansion. But, yeah, I think this is the first...
one john's done for the setting she says yes oh yes it's the first official one it's the first official one yeah cool i thought so i just felt underconfident for a moment but yeah so so that is going to be coming out and when is that when is that is that out now or is it she says not being clear about that it's not something i know let me look now i think it is out now on itch yes you can just get it you can just get on it yeah it cost me ten dollars i just bought it
Oh, great. There we go. So yeah, I was just checking in with that now.
That's why we invite guests onto the podcast. Now this podcast has cost me money.
Yeah, you can also get the complete bundle. But I did get a fine new product. Yeah, you can get up on that. And then I'm sure at some point it'll be available as a physical book as well if you like those sorts of things as well. But yeah, at the moment that is available. And if you like Blazing the Dark, it's more of what you like. And for $10, you can't really complain about that.
you like blaze in the dark as well russ like you like the the clock system and stuff like that when you've played um i played blaze and yeah it's fun i feel like in the last couple of years i've played an awful lot of sort of d6 like i said i'm sort of going off d6 is about i've played so many d6 games i feel like in the last couple of years they're all starting to feel a bit the same
And I'm starting to go a bit off them now. I'm looking for a bit more variety. I kind of feel like I'm playing the same game all the time. I mean, rules like D6 games, there's a lot of them out there. And they're starting to kind of blend in my head a little bit now.
Wow, wow. Fair enough. Just a reminder for listeners that Russ is editing the same podcast, so good luck with going out.
Yeah, and your own system, what's old is new, is in the D6 dice ball system.
Yeah, so is my awkwardly cheerful engine. Except for that one, that one's awesome. Well, that's the thing, a year ago, I loved D6 dice ball games. I think I've just played too many of them now. I think I've just, I need to calm down and play something different.
Yeah, calm down. All right. Well, let's move on from another piece of news then. If you don't want to talk about D6 dice ball systems, what else do you want to talk about?
Well, I'd like to tell you that it's beginning to look a lot like Critmas.
I see what you did there.
So Critical Role has got a Christmas album coming.
Okay.
It's called Winter's Crest. This is a thing. I had not heard it. It exists. It's not going to be like the Star Wars special, is it? Well, it's four musical tracks. Winter's Crest Festival Time, Silent Mind, Twelve Days of Grogmas, and It's Critmas are the four tracks. I can't tell you any more than that. To be honest, I haven't heard it. All I know is that this is a thing that's happening.
You can stream it right now. It's on Spotify. You can go and listen to it right now if you want to.
Sounds pun-tastic.
Covering slaves. Merry Christmas.
It's Christmas.
And here it is. Merry Christmas. Yeah. Okay, I'll stop. Probably even fast.
Yeah. Probably even fast.
Yeah. All right. Well then, Critical Role Christmas then.
Even though it's only just November. Buster. They're talking about Christmas.
Yeah, but this is when it starts, isn't it?
I saw Christmas things in the shops in September.
Did you?
It made me unreasonably angry.
I mean, sometimes we need a budget for these things.
We've got some cards outside you can share with that if you like, Russ.
Yeah, well, I think there should be a rule, no Christmas before Halloween.
Yeah, that's fair. Halloween has passed now. I mean, America does have the Thanksgiving buffer.
Well, there's that as well. But I wouldn't be surprised if I went into a shop tomorrow and saw some Easter eggs there. I mean, what's that? It's only four months away. Right, so we're us. Right, so. Anyway.
Okay. Do you have any other news, PJ, to maybe move us on?
Well, I did see a game called Dwarf Mine, which is a game about drawing and designing a mine, uncovering treasures, and surviving the dangers of a mountain. And that looked kind of fun. I will whack this into the show notes.
Yeah, take a look. Is it an RPG?
You're not going to cost me more money. Is there a barrel log at the bottom of the mountain? That's the question.
Well, it's a procedurally generated game available from itch.io for very small amounts of money. Like, it's super cheap. You can get nice digital downloads. You'll create a rich and unique history for your mind. No two games are the same.
full price is seven dollars and it's on sale right now so yeah it's pretty cheap i mean it's like it's like an rpg stocking for that there we go yeah actually that does sound like a nice something to get your gm as a little present or something yeah so it's like a you build a mine and it's almost like a bit of world building stuff and then i guess you could use it in your rpg it's like a solo game
I believe so, yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it looks like it could be quite a fun little way to do some world building. So maybe picking it up myself. Yeah. Yeah.
That's cool. Apparently I bought this. It's just everything we mentioned.
Mike's going to buy.
Yes. How this is going to work.
No, I had already bought this one.
Oh, okay.
All right, let's quickly mention the Monstrous Menagerie 2. Already too late.
Not only did I back the Kickstarter, I have a monster in it. So... Nice. I'm on both sides of the equation on that one.
Which one's your monster?
I think I did like the menagerie version of Deathlock Whites, like spellcasting white types. So I think there's like a Warlock White. There's three different versions of Warlock Whites that are different CRs. Yeah, I saw that. Mostly because I needed those monsters.
I need them to exist.
Yeah, right. Like, I need spellcasting. I need, like, mid-level undead spellcasting monsters. So why not get paid to make them?
Yeah. Layout hasn't quite got that far yet because W is right at the end of the alphabet. Oh, yeah. I'm working from the front. Yeah.
Yeah.
As is the way.
All right, that's a cool little dwarf find. I like that.
Yeah, that is very cool, yeah. I have two further items, so we can split them out, or I can give them both to you.
Shall we pitter in some maybe not as exciting news of the Apple Patreon situation?
Okay, so we have mentioned it before, but as a brief summary, essentially Apple is... for people that use the Apple App Store Patreon app is going to insist that Patreon pays them 30%. Yeah, if they subscribe through the app. If they subscribe through the app, which is basically Apple's standard. Tyler Fisher, like, you know, everyone.
Um, so I'm not sure why they have some other ones. They, they, they, they have some other subscription models that they work with other groups. And I think, I think Patreon was under one of those at one point. And that's why they, they, they used to have less of a fee. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then it turned into more of a fee.
Well, so basically what that means is if you support a Patreon and you did so via the Patreon app on the Apple app store and subscribed to the Patreon via that, um, you'll probably, assuming the creator doesn't decide to suck up the 30%, which they probably can't afford to do, going to be paying more on Patreon for that.
Yeah, and Patreon, right, they set up a thing where you just automatically increase the price of the Patreon subscription for the App Store by 30%. Of course, the answer to that is,
unsubscribe on the app, go re-subscribe via one.
Yeah, right. Anybody that's listening to this, don't subscribe through the app.
Go ahead and subscribe. Subscribe through the website.
Right, subscribe through the website.
And sell yourself some money.
Yeah. Top money, second touch. I mean, it's just, you know, I went from being a big Apple fan to now being an angry, heavy Apple user. over stuff like this. And as I heard on a tech podcast I was listening to, Apple used to be about selling really great hardware and now they're about selling really great hardware and extorting people.
And the app store is like, you know, when they go to Patreon, like how much does Patreon make? They make well less than 30%. From every subscription, there's no margin anywhere, right? Like the idea that there's a 30% margin. And also the real killer of this is they actually reduce the functionality at the same time. So some patron creators who really got hurt were the ones that did a four.
for work style, right? So there are artists and creators that said, like, you know, we'll charge you $2 per adventure, we're going to put out some number of adventures per month, and then you'll get those adventures. Apple doesn't have a way to handle that.
So that means you either had to say you will not ever have an Apple, you know, subscription from Apple, or you had to change your whole business model.
Yeah, that's our problem. Inside a magazine.
Yeah, was that per issue?
Yeah, so per article, basically. So we put out four to five articles per month.
Yeah. And you pay per article. So a lot of creators had to change their, you know, they had to shift their entire store around in order to not have that part shut off.
I think, I could be wrong, but because I don't use it as a seller, but I believe that's actually Patreon rather than Apple. Patreon using Apple's price increase to put in some other things, which are...
My understanding is that Apple didn't have any other way to handle it than monthly. Their whole subscription model for everything on Apple is a monthly subscription model, not even a work model. And I don't think I've ever seen any other app that did that.
Fair enough. How was Apple doing it before?
now so i think i think it was just less well i don't know that's a good question i think maybe they were letting patreon just get away with it like it was count it counted as a different kind of service and so they they they didn't they didn't bother with it and and then suddenly they did and there'll be a question and and russ i think you mentioned this too is like i don't even you you said you actually know how many people subscribe through the apps through the app yeah
I don't, right? I can't figure out how I would figure that out.
There's like insights or something like that. There's a tab on there, insights or something like that. And you can see the different platforms people are using.
Huh. Okay. I'll have to, and fortunately, I imagine it's low. I don't, I don't imagine the Apple app is insignificant.
It's annoying for those individuals.
Yeah. Right. Right. It's still not great. And it's just, you know, there's so much not to turn into an anti-Apple thing, but like, you know, the whole idea of like, oh, well, you can't even mention that there's another way to subscribe other than the app store anywhere in any app. So they can literally kick you out of the App Store if there's even a way to link to a website that says that you can.
To be fair, something like DriveThruRPG has the exact same rule. You can't.
Do they really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You can't even link to another website. They're not a $3 trillion company. Right. You know, they're not like, you know, I always, I always get the feeling that like Apple is still pretending it's this like scrappy small company that's fighting against the big guys. And you're like, you're a $3 trillion company. The biggest company in the world. Yeah. Right.
Well, yeah. Them and Nvidia, depending on how AI is doing every week. But like, you know, it's just, and, and, and there's no reason for it. Like, you know, the 30% is outrageous for the service they offer. Right. It's crazy, crazy high. That's how they become the biggest company in the world, isn't it? Well, that's true.
And it's because they decided that extortion is their new business model, right? That like selling hardware only gets you so far. Eventually, everyone has an iPhone. And so the only other way is to squeeze more money out of everybody else.
Yeah. And you get to the point where the hardware doesn't change enough from year to year.
Right. I mean, I'm hanging on my stuff.
Well, yeah, I'm like a once every two years. I used to be an every year person. I'd upgrade my phone. Now it's once every two years because there's just not enough different. Yeah. Like a slightly better camera and a slightly faster processor.
But like, you know, right. That doesn't, that doesn't excuse them saying like, oh, I guess we'll find another model that squeezes money out of, you know, creators.
I don't know.
I do have a small thing that has come up a couple of times on Instagram. It's about the Honor Amongst Thieves sequel. The Dungeons and Dragons movie. Oh, yeah.
Sequel? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I've not heard about a sequel. Yeah, what's... People talk about a sequel, but apparently there's some problems because the cast can't agree on schedules to get the dates ready for the next film.
Can't imagine. We can't schedule a D&D game. What are you talking about? We can all commiserate with that. Yeah.
I'm afraid I've raised hopes and then dashed them. I do apologize.
But yeah. It's the theme of the week, isn't it, TJ? Anyway, yeah, Twitch. Talk about Twitch.
Yeah, there was a bit of a pre-show discussion between myself and Jess, because I'm probably a bit out of date, because what I do is when I'm browsing into it, I say, oh, that's interesting, and I put it into my calendar, and it pops up as a little reminder for the podcast, but I don't generally look too closely after that.
And Twitch had put in new content creator guidelines, insisting on labelling. When I saw it, it was insisting that anyone whose identity was not cis, straight, would have to label their content in order to avoid... would have to label it as political, essentially, which...
is I mean it doesn't really sit right when like your existence is political it feels bad yeah yeah no I was looking up on this because I do every week as everyone knows again this is Mike she's talking about Baldur's Gate 3 this week so I do a weekly Baldur's Gate 3 live stream with a group of other women who work in the games industry and amongst us we're a group of queer some of us are trans and so when this came up we normally stream on Twitch and we're like oh because sometimes we talk about these things because it's the Baldur's
gate three cocktail hour with a bunch of girls having a drink so sometimes and i was like are we going to have to label our content as political now because it's generally not like but in terms of the service it counted but they have done an update on it like maybe a backtrack or clarification whatever you want to call it and they have said you don't actually now require a label if you're speaking about your own lived experience on topics
such as gender, race, sexuality, or religion. They've clarified in terms of politics, you can have informational educational content that shares knowledge in a neutral manner. So for example, they've given the US political situation.
They said, so you could share the history of how votes in the US works, how the election works, how they're counted, or encourage the concept of people to vote or register and vote. Those things are all okay. But if you're making a post supporting a specific candidate, that would need to be tagged as political content. And the same with sensitive social issues.
If you were making like if you were like, I'm going to have a political show talking about this particular group's rights and advocacy for them and things, then that would need to be tagged as that content. But if you are just a person existing in any minority group, you don't have to tag it as such is what they've clarified. And there is an article on.
Yeah, I'm just looking at that now. Yeah.
So they've kind of clarified on it because before it was unclear. But it's important. Yeah. So that's kind of my understanding of the situation currently. So if you, like myself, are a queer Twitch streamer, you don't need to tag yourself as such constantly on every stream you do. It's my understanding.
Yeah. Yeah. But that does sound like a big improvement. Yeah. There's been a lot of I was aware of it before the events of Tuesday, and now I'm... And since then, everything has disappeared. But I might be missing stuff in the streaming.
I mean, possibly. We were streaming on Wednesday, because that's Wednesday when we streamed. So, yeah, this all kind of came about on Tuesday, and we're like, oh, what are we doing tomorrow, ladies? What's happening here? But yeah, everything's fine, and our streams are still up, so clearly everything's okay. You know? Anyway.
Yeah.
That's what's going on. That was what the hoo-ha was with Twitch. But Twitch have some support articles going into more detail if you want to read it and check and clarify for yourself.
Had we heard of anybody either getting booted off or getting any, you know, was there... I'm wondering how much of this is like a CYA versus actual, they've actually done it to somebody.
No one I know, but PJ, I don't know if you've heard different...
Well, it's hard to tell when people have been deplatformed.
Yeah, by definition.
They can't really say anything.
But I haven't seen any shouting about it lately. But as I say, there is a lot of shouting and screaming.
Yeah, and it doesn't excuse their, you know, a policy is a policy and it doesn't excuse a poor policy. I'm just curious.
It sounds a bit more reasonable, but the devil's always in the details. So we'll just have to see how it's applied.
Yeah. Hey, this world gets other-ended.
Oh, yeah.
What was the score on the door? In pounds, basically 2.3 million pounds. I don't know what that is in US dollars. Let me quickly stick this into Google and find out what that is in US dollars.
2.9, I think. Nice. 2.9, almost 3 million dollars.
Oh, just short.
2.96.
2.96. Oh, no. You can still back it, I guess. They left it open.
Yeah, they're doing late pledges on Kickstarter because Kickstarter has that feature now.
Yeah, 16,451 backers. That's a lot of backers. That is a lot of backers.
Quite a few people.
Yeah. So that puts it at like number seven or eight in the million-dollar Kickstarter club. Mm-hmm. Quite high. Anyway, actually, let me check exactly where it comes. $182 average per backer. Was it $2.9 million? Yeah. 2.9 million puts it at number seven.
Nice. In the top 10.
Yes, in the top 10. In the top 10. I mean, there's been 2 million. There's been 16 that have done 2 million. And obviously there's been 41 now, including this one, that have done a million or more.
I imagine it'll do well at retail as well because it feels almost, like you said before, a coffee table pretty good. So if you know a friend really likes Terry Pratchett, and even if you're not a gamer, you might see that and be like, oh, this is a thing my friend might like, you know, or something like that. It feels like a good retail product in that sense.
And especially given how rules-light it is, a non-gamer will probably get a lot of value out of that. There'll be a lot of basically setting lore content, I guess, and art.
Absolutely.
I would imagine.
They wouldn't need an entire book giving you advice on how to play the game, for example, like other systems might need.
I don't know. Maybe it is an entire book. I don't know.
It's also a sort of guide.
That collector cover is killer. Yeah. Was that a segue?
No, I was just looking at the collector's cover for the Discworld one. It looks really, really good. It's like an MC Escher kind of cover.
I just bought the basic one. I kind of wish I might upgrade that. You could probably upgrade. That is a pretty cover, isn't it?
I haven't picked it up because I know enough people around me are picking it up that I'll get a chance to play.
The thing is, I don't think I'll probably play it.
I was counting on you were going to run it sometime and I was going to get it to play.
He's run it already. I've run it already, yeah.
There you go.
Talked about it on the podcast. Did we actually talk about Blazing the Dark Deep Cuts from John Harper or were we going to talk about that? We did talk about it. The first official expansion. It'll last me $10. There we go. $10 on itch.
Hmm. So shiny. Well, if that is all of the non D and D news, unless anyone can think of anything that we've missed.
Apart from the fact that the Monster Smasher 2 is going to be launching next week.
That's true.
Maybe we have Paul Hughes on next week to talk about that.
Yeah.
I think.
He's my hero. Yeah. Well, he's got a cape and everything.
He's incredible.
Yeah. I didn't know about a cape.
Cape in an Excel spreadsheet. Monster map. That changed the game.
Exactly. He's a nerd superhero. Yeah.
So we'll talk about that then, but that is happening.
Yes, Tuesday. Five days from now. Five days? Four days. Five days. Four days. It depends when they're listening to it.
It depends when they're listening to it.
That is also true.
It could be tomorrow or in the past from the listener's perspective.
Well, everything is relative, I suppose.
It is, yes. It's all in the Jeremy Beremy of it all.
Yeah.
Should we talk about the Dungeon Master's Guide? Yes, yeah. It's a bit of a dry segue, but it's efficient.
I mean, there's one thing to point out here. Only one of the four of us have the Dungeon Master's Guide. Because it's not here yet. It's not in this country yet. Not until the 12th. Really?
Am I the only one? You're the only one that's got it. If it's any consolation, I literally have enough copies for all of you. I think I've got three physical and easy ones. If you could just, like, part it through the screen, that would be... Right, I'll just... Yeah, right up at the camera.
I'm sure that'll work. Yeah, that'd be fine.
Just grab it.
No, no, no. If you hold it up to the camera, Wizards of the Coast will take the video down.
That's right.
I've already faced that. Ah, pages! It can't come after a podcast, though. You get an audio version. Right, right.
Listen to the last episode Mike was on if you'd like to hear more about that.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Chapter one. Read the entire thing. Dungeons & Dragons is a game in which you and your friends take on the roles and tell a shared story. This is going to take a while. Right. This is going to be a while. 384 pages.
Do they have to be my friends? Can they not just be acquaintances?
Clearly, no. It says friends.
Oh.
So you are against the grain.
That means we can't play at conventions with people we don't know.
That's what I mean. Oh, no. They're still friends. They're new friends. You just met. I suppose.
No, I don't know. I haven't vetted them.
Well, that's true. Some people are terrible. Start with friends and then chew them aside when they violate.
Oh, no, no. Wrong way around. Anyway.
Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet. Maybe. Apparently.
I don't know if you guys know what it's like to be a woman in the world, but that is not the right attitude to strangers. Anyway, so let's actually talk about the Dungeon Masters, guys. We've been talking about it a lot because we've seen so many previews and so much stuff, but I've not actually read through the book and had a copy.
So what are your thoughts as somebody who actually has got their copy?
Yeah, I'm filled with thoughts. For one, I'm very happy because I'm going to have lots of things to talk about on my own podcast and show for many months to come based on the stuff that's in this. I think it's pretty good. So I think it accomplishes the goal of helping someone new to the game, grasping what it means to be a game master. I would say a lot of the advice is excellent.
I think it's kind of core advice about what RPGs are. And the philosophies that a GM should have are pretty sound. I think there are a couple of missteps that in particular, you know, make steam come out of my ears, which I can I can talk about, but I don't want to I don't want to just, you know, go right into all the bad stuff on the post. Yeah, right. But I think it does.
So the organization, just like the player's handbook, I thought the organization of the player's handbook was absolutely outstanding. I think the organization, the game master's guy or the dungeon master's guy is also outstanding.
way you know way better like i i really feel like the 2014 dungeon masters guide was a highly underrated book like i i get why people didn't like it and it's valid why they didn't like it is valid but there's a lot of really good stuff in that book it was just organized it's just finding the stuff Finding this stuff was a mess.
And the idea of like page four, let's talk about the currencies of your campaign world, right? And it was like, you know, page three, making your own pantheon. And you're like, oh my God, like this is not helpful advice.
Yeah, you haven't actually told me what a D&D game section is.
Right, you haven't told me what a D&D is. Exactly, right. So this one definitely is organized better. It still has a lot of that stuff. Like it has a big cosmology section and a big multiverse section. you know, that kind of talks about all of the various worlds and it's got a lot of cool lore about all that stuff in it, you know? And, and so, but that's not, it's chapter six, not chapter one.
Yeah.
And so, you know, getting into the basics of it, I think are really good. So I, I, one thing that I asked a lot of friends of mine and a lot of, I have on, on, on the slight flares discord server, we talked about this a lot was like, what, what, if we, if we're looking at this, what do we think it is missing? that was critical to the game, right?
Like, is it missing something that's critical to the game? And nobody could really come up with anything like, you know, it was like, no, it pretty much has everything that you need to actually run the game. That doesn't mean it's not missing stuff.
And and one of my big points and something I put in my show last week is like the cool bit is if you're if you're willing to do a little bit of investment, there are three other game master guides you can pick up that are all excellent and all offer a different view of five.
And they're all usable together, including, of course, Level Up Advanced 5Z's Trials and Treasure, which is an absolutely outstanding Game Master's Guide and has lots of stuff. You know, good news for you guys.
Do you know we never actually intended that to be a Game Master's Guide, though?
well it clearly we we kind of like we will at some point write a game master's guide but for us that was the exploration of magic items yes right and well that's what's what's great is like the exploration section in the dungeon masters the 2024 dungeon masters guide is really thin and so it's very easy to say if you want a crunchier you know in depth both from a from a gm inspirational standpoint and from actual like a mechanics of how to run exploration stuff
level up advanced 5e's trials and treasure is excellent at that right and it's got it you know it's in my opinion the best of all the game masters guides for 5e that i've seen you know for that for that one angle if you're looking for tons and tons of optional rules to throw into your 5e system the tales of the the tales of the valiant game masters guide is packed with all these different optional rules different ways to run combat different you know two different ways to run hordes of monsters
vehicle combat wars all this other kind of stuff that isn't in this book at all and so what it means is like as a as a hobby they're kind of done away with optional rules really much yeah right almost completely yeah i mean and and i think like one one that's confusing is flanking so flanking was in the 2014 dungeon masters guide and it is as far as i could tell from surveying dms like maybe next to bonus action healing potions was one of the most common
optional rules that people used. And it's not in here at all, right? There's a ton of, yeah, it's not in, there's nothing about flanking. As far as I know, like it's a big book, a 384 page book. And every so often there's like, oh, there's two sentences over here that I missed, but I didn't see anything. I didn't see anything about flanking in it.
Flanking in base D&D with the full advantage from flanking just from position.
Yeah, it was terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of flanking and I've never actually run it in my games. But I do, like, it was a popular, it was a popular option. And so it's interesting not to have any angle on that.
It actually works a lot better than I thought it would. Because it's only a bonus D4. Much smaller, yeah. From positional stuff. which is something that isn't like, you have to do it. You're an idiot for not doing it.
What I kind of found in 2014 D&D was certain types of characters would have advantage on almost every attack.
Like a ranger would pretty much have advantage on every attack. And in 2024 D&D, that's absolutely true. There's so many more ways to get advantage on attacks.
that you know even having flanking as an option that almost doesn't matter because like rogues can just be like yeah i'm just not going to move and i have advantage of my attack right like there's so many other way and then god help me with topple and everything else there's so many ways to like you know get advantage on your enemies anyway what do we know is because we were looking at the table of contents last week and we were sort of like looking because from a table of contents
The main thing you can tell is how many pages have been devoted to each target. One of the things that struck us was we looked at what was, as far as we could tell, from the... Oops, I'm sorry. That is... Don't worry. As far as we could tell, the social were like one page.
Yeah, right.
And that was it in the entire book. And given that D&D is supposed to be three pillars. Yep. Yeah, combat, social, and exploration.
Right. And which one of those does Bastion's fallen in? That's like 30-some pages. So, yeah, there's definitely an interesting focus.
yeah there's definitely an interesting focus on that and and yeah they have like a social interactions encounter section where they talk about it they also have like an npc you know a little section on npcs in the dm toolbox that you can kind of dig into and there's a couple of places where organizationally the book is like that where it kind of takes a topic and splits it into two different areas but yeah it doesn't it doesn't have a lot on that i would i would say it doesn't have a whole lot on exploration as a concept either
in the same way that that other 5e games have kind of you know like again like level of advanced 5e where they kind of grabbed on harder onto those other two pillars and wanted to make sure the characters had more they're really they're really falling back to ability you know ability checks as the core the core idea on how to handle that but it does have and you saw it in the player's handbook as well
a fair bit of like instructions to the DM and what it's like to role play as a character, you know, both like the, the, the player's handbook has that. And there are sections, the examples here that kind of show what those things are like. So it's a big question of like, how much of a system do you need for something like that?
And how much of that is like aiming, aiming GMs and players in the right direction, not just a system, but just,
talking about the topic advice you know I don't know it's like social interaction in a game if it's a third of the game in my mind probably deserves
Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not nothing like there's a whole running social interactions chapter. Like, again, I think it's one of those things where like, if you look at all of the sections where it talks about it, if they had put it all together into one spot, you might not think it was too thin. Right. But because it's spread across a few different areas of the book and, and yeah.
And like the, you know, the, the one for me that caught my attention, cuz it's, it's my bag was the whole, like, how do you prep a session? Right. And and I was always very curious about that. And that's another one where they sort of spread it across a couple of different areas. It's right up front in the big.
I think that's excellent. I think looking at that table of contents and saying how to prep a session, how to run a game right at the start of the book.
Until you until you see what they say. Well, it's not, you know, it's easy for me. It's not how I would have done it or have done it. There's that. But I do think that in some cases, like when you go to that first section on how to run a session and it's like it's pretty or like how to how to prep a session. Right. And it's got this really cool, like one hour guideline. Some of it is great.
This idea of like a one hour guide, like what is this stuff that you could typically expect a game to steer towards in roughly one hour of game time? And it's like probably, you know, two or three of the following things. And it gives this list of things. And then it talks about preparation time.
But the really interesting is right up front preparation time says the following guidelines can help you prepare for a session of play using a published adventure. So they immediately assume, like for that section right up front that you're running a published adventure, right?
And in my polls and surveys, it's about half of people run published adventures, and about half of them are making up their own. So there's like, well, what about prep? First of all, couldn't have you made that useful for both instead of just published adventures? And that's, you know, because
Does it talk about homebrew campaigns at all in the intro?
It does, yes. No, not in the intro. I mean, I'm sure it does. I know it does later in the book. I'm sure it does somewhere. But, like, in that particular section on, like, you know, on how to prep a session, how to run a session, that's where I would have said, like, you know, there are different ways to do it.
But it's all, like, read and reread the adventure's introduction and background information, right? And it's like, well, I don't have that because I'm making my own adventure.
Yeah, yeah.
So it kind of, like, up front, I think they could have, in my opinion – could have done a better job of clarifying this stuff. And, and I feel like that, that is that again, because it's my bag and it's a thing, one of the, you know, one of the main things I'm always paying attention to is like, how good is their step-by-step for, for, for Korea? So they have a chapter called creating adventures.
Hmm.
And you're like, this is okay. Finally, we're going to get a good practical advice on like what you should do when you're sitting down to make an adventure. And the steps are like, lay out the premise, draw in the players, plan encounters and bring it to an end. And I'm like, those are so high level and so fuzzy.
And what I need is like, and somebody brought it up that like mothership, you know, the RPG mothership. Yeah. It's down with a piece of paper.
Write down this thing. Yeah. Yes.
And so. You know, and I am both dismayed and then happy because I was dismayed by like, man, this was your chance to really tell people how to make an adventure. And I'm like, oh, wait a minute. I wrote a book on that. Right. I wrote up any any award winning book on that. So like, you know, hey, good news. My book is still very valuable because it actually has a practical step for doing this.
And it's also one of the things and you know, I you know, I love I love I love me some level up advanced 5e. But as you said, the trials and treasure book isn't a game master's guide. Right? And I didn't know that I thought it was.
And one of them is having a chapter of game masters advice in it.
I think that's why people think it is none of the none of the 5e game master books, and I've worked on one of them, right? And none of them have this practical, like, hey, here's what you need to do when you sit down to prep a game. Like if you have an hour to prep a game, here are the things that you should do to prep that game.
And this one's really close in that it has the hour and it talks about it. But then it's like, well, we are going to assume you have a published adventure. No, you shouldn't assume that. You can give advice whether you have a published adventure or not, but it should be advice that's useful for both.
I guess they come from the point of view that their business is selling those published adventures, though. So maybe they kind of assume that that's, I don't know.
Yeah. Or they want new people to have that expectation.
They know.
Right.
I mean, of course, this is what you do. We've talked. I've talked to them. Right. I've talked to the people that wrote. I've talked to James White. I've talked to Chris Perkins. And I like they they run public. They run homebrew adventures. Yeah. Yeah. They know. They know everyone. They're not. Yeah. I don't I don't think this was like the marketing team got involved.
It's like, hey, make sure to push the publish adventures. I think they know. I just I don't know. I think I think, you know, they did. Yeah. And then again, the step-by-step adventures has a whole breakout box here on using published adventures.
And it's good advice about how to tailor a published adventure around the group that you have, how to change the NPCs around the backgrounds of the characters, how to change arcs and things like that. That's all fantastic. And even how to like break them out into pieces and just use the pieces that you like to fill out your homebrew adventure. That advice is in here.
So, you know, there's lots of, there's lots of good advice, but I do feel like they were right on the edge of being super practical and, and getting away from what they did with the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide and then kind of, you know, got fuzzy and fuzzy again. So so that that is it critical?
No, because like one thing I think is interesting about the Dungeon Master's Guide in particular is I don't think it's a critical book at all other than magic items. Because the 2014 one is pretty well established as not being a great game master, dungeon master's guide. And yet the growth of the game was higher in that period of time over the past 10 years than any other period of time for D&D.
So clearly, if it held it back, it didn't hold it back a lot.
I guess part of that, though, is because the way people learn how to play a game now isn't so much by reading games.
That's right. It's by watching a video. Watching videos and stuff like that, or hopefully reading blog articles and buying other people's books. Yeah, absolutely. And that's true, but that still means that the lift for this book isn't nearly as heavy as the lift for the Player's Handbook. The Player's Handbook, things have to be right, because if it's wrong, It's in every player's hand forever.
Right. But stuff, stuff's wrong in here. If you're a game master, you just go and read a, you know, read an article, watch a video and change it or just change it on your own because we can, on the GM side, we can do whatever we want.
I mean, it does seem a bit... I'm not convinced of this idea that people are reading books and learning how to run games from them. Like, the concept of games marketing, like, you know, the concept, like the beginning concept, I think a lot of people do it because they've started playing role-playing games and they sort of learn it from other people. Yeah, sure. That's something I learned.
I mean, that's definitely how I learned as well. Like I joined a role-playing club and that's when I started playing. But notice I played for about a decade before I even attempted to start running games. But I think actually there's a lot of people that do. If they're not part of an RPG community at all and it's a bunch of like four friends that's like, I want to start trying this.
I know a lot of people that someone's just been tagged it to run a game and has had to figure it out. So I think there are some people that actually... There you go. Eleven?
I want to say 11. When I was 11, we and four of my friends started playing D&D. We didn't know anyone else who played D&D. There was no such thing as the internet. We couldn't go and look up how to play D&D. There was no advice anywhere. At all. So basically you had to pretty much come up on your own with what a D and D game. You don't even know what a D and D game looks like. Right.
I mean, you know, if that's from a really broad perspective, unless someone shows you.
The Mike, the Mike Merle's quote about, I took the monster manual and started running through it alphabetically. Right? Amazing.
Nobody really knew what to do with these things. Yeah. I mean, my first role-playing experience was, because I didn't get D&D first of all, I got a Warhammer Fantasy Battles boxed set bought for me by my dad, I think, for my birthday or Christmas when I was 11. And I took it to school to show my friends. And I was like, look at this thing, this game my dad's bought me.
And they're going, what is it? And I go, I'm not really sure. But that's a little... So we opened it and there were these three black and white books in there and some dice and things like that. But it was a tabletop battles game. Now, Why are we saying that you don't necessarily know what a role-playing game looks like if no one's shown you?
You also don't know what a tabletop battle game looks like if no one's shown you. And we took those tabletop battle rules and somehow we played a role-playing game with it without even realizing that's not what we had. Because we'd never seen either. And somehow we interpreted that as a role-playing game, which was really weird. I don't know how we came up with that. But that...
It didn't have a section on, this is what a tabletop battle is. This is how a tabletop battle game tends to run and what it looks like and what you're doing in the game. It just launched into the rules. And I think the same thing, like I've heard people say to me, what is D&D really, though? What do you do? I mean, do you dress in costumes and talk in silly voices? What exactly is it?
and they don't literally don't know what the game yeah like the deborah ann wall video that went around a couple months ago where she like immediately jumps into like now you're playing dnd yeah like what do you do really good yeah yeah yeah in fact that's probably one of the best it was just missing her reaching into a pocket and throwing out a d20 yeah that was one of the best intros i've ever seen for yeah right right and and i think it's a fantastic yeah yeah yeah
But I do think there are some people that come to it still now, which seems strange because there's so much media and there is like actual plays and you've got references on like Stranger Things where people can like see and like... But I think there are some people that just are a group of friends like, I don't know, we'll figure this out.
And for some Dungeon Masters, that book will actually be their first introduction and... guide that feels a bit twisted like that, but that'll be their main guide. How do I do this? How do I figure this out?
Yeah, I mean, the designers back in 2014 said, like, the reason why the Dungeon Masters, the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide was organized the way it was, is their expectation was you learn from the starter set, right? That everybody would buy the starter set, the starter set would have instructions on what to do.
And then by the time you got to Dungeon Masters Guide, you were already running and now it was time to build out a world and add coins and figure out what your cosmology was. And that they also had an expectation that they were mainly writing books for people who already played. Yeah. That was the thing. I don't think they did not expect to have five times what it was, but it's not there. Yeah.
What it is now. Um, it does bring up like an, an interesting, like what, you know, what, um, roles does a dungeon master's guide fill? Like, what does it need to fill? And when do you use it?
And I think on the idea of whether you read it, and I think for some, it's like handy to have a codified written instruction on what it means to be a game master, particularly with like the, you know, the main things of, you know, what it means to be a good game master. And then there's a lot of like, you know, ideas, a toolkit, and they have it.
They have a whole section called the DM's Toolbox, which is mostly ideas that you could go and read and go, oh, that's cool. And then you know it. And you don't need to check the book again when you're running it. You're like, I'm just going to do that thing that they talked about with death, right? That death isn't always just a death save and that's it.
That there's other ways I can kind of build off of the idea of death. And then there's actually things that like at the table you need, which is mostly, you know, 95% is probably magic items. And then on occasion, there may be other little reference things that you'd want to look up. But generally, like, you know, some of it is just picking up an idea.
I mean, this is what I base my books on is that my hope is that you will read it and then you know it and you don't need to necessarily read the book again, unless it's like a book of random tables. And hopefully it helps you during prep.
Yeah.
Wake up your brain to do kind of other cool ideas.
Yeah. I think a Dungeon Master's Guide, its primary function, tell you how to run a game.
Yeah.
From scratch, like assume you know nothing and tell you from, you know, you are the Dungeon Master. This is what that is. This is the things that you'll be doing. This is what you're responsible for. And then go into the whole prepping a session, doing all that. And then also making your game better. Advice. Basically, tools, advice and tools are the other thing.
A tool for preparation, whereas Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, these are books that you use at the table.
Yeah, right, right. Those books, you can't not use them. But like, yeah, I remember hearing the design team saying like, hey, we recognize that the DMG was the one book you left at home. And they almost said it like they wanted to solve that problem. Like, if I can get away with only two books, shouldn't I? Like, do you really want to make it more complex that I now need to add a third book?
So, you know, I don't I don't and, you know, I don't think that that has had its way in there. But I think like, you know, right on page five, right? So right. And I'm going to show it right, right on the videos coming down. No, you know, they have like their DM tips. And I was like, oh, DM tips like this is, you know, like, let's see what they say here. And it's, you know, they're fantastic.
Like embrace the shared story. It's not a competition. Be fair and flexible. Communicate with your players and it's okay to make mistakes. And I'm like, those aren't the exact same ones I have, but they're pretty close.
It's like it's not a competition. Yeah. Why would you not necessarily assume if you weren't told otherwise? Right. It's not the players versus the DM.
That's exactly right. I know, I know DMs who have been playing for 40 years that don't know that. Yeah.
Yeah.
Right. So it is, those are, those are, and embrace the shared stories and other like that, that one being critical. Like when people ask me my number one tip, my number one tip is the story happens at the table. It doesn't happen when you're doing your prep. And, and, and that's because GMs often fail at that. And, and,
And honestly, some of the adventures in here fail at that, which I think is another interesting point.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think maybe all of us have been at a table with a GM who has their world and their story and someone tries to add to it. They're like, oh, well, I want my person to be from here. And let's say that they had this culture where this happened and the GM was like, no, I don't want that. It's like, oh, and that immediately makes the table vibe be like,
I think there's an element of some gems kind of also want to write a novel. That's right.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think like, yeah.
I had a friend come to that conclusion. They were writing a role-playing game and they're like, oh man, but it's just, I don't, I just want to like control and do this myself. And it's like, I realized I want to write a book.
So, so I think like what makes those tips interesting is that, you know, all of them have a contrary point that some GMs do. and maybe all of them, but like embrace the shared story, like we were just talking about. People often are telling, they come to the table with a story and they get upset when the characters don't behave the way that they're supposed to behave.
And even old D&D adventures, the old Dragonlance adventures, right? Those are novels where, you know, you were on the ride riding through the novel, you know, so they didn't embrace the shared story. They're like, no, you're playing these characters and this is what's going to happen to you. It not being a competition example, being fair and flexible.
I don't know that anybody be like, oh, make sure to cheat. Communicate with your players. That's what I often bring up. I have my Patreon. I do a Q&A and a lot of people are like so many times on the Q&A, the people bring up questions and the answer is talk to your players.
Like just break character and talk to your players and say, hey, this is the way this quest model works so that you don't have to like waste a lot of time figuring it out. I might not have been clear. You know, one of my things is like players are only getting half of what you're telling them. Right. And, you know, stealing it from E.B. White.
And, you know, that that is so talking to your players is like often a good solution for a lot of the problems that you have.
Yeah.
And it's OK to make mistakes. One of the things, Baldwin, David Christ, who runs Baldwin Games, which I think is the largest organized play program for any RPG. Right. Yeah. Millions of literally I know he's run hundreds of thousands, if not millions of games. And he's definitely run millions of players.
And he said that, like, in the surveys that they run, rules knowledge is lowest on the list of importance, right? That when it comes to, like, the things that make a game good, you know, being friendly, running a fun game, being prepared for what you need to run are way, score way higher and are attributed to a higher, a more fun game than knowing the rules of the game.
And I think they hit that here, right? That it's okay to make mistakes, right? That, you know, here's how to handle that. So I think that the book largely, like, again, I'm 95% really happy with some of it. And then what's good for me, because, you know, I like making content about RPG stuff.
I like writing books and I like doing YouTubes, is then there's a bunch of them are like, oh, that's terrible. Like, you know, this is going to hurt Game Masters. Like you are offering a piece of advice that is going to hurt Game Masters.
Well, let's do a best and worst bit then.
Sure. Okay.
So let's start positive.
Five, maybe.
Let's start positive. What would you say the best? Say two or three things. It might take a while, but best things about it.
Yeah. I mean, for me, We can't comment. You can't say ah. That's great. I get to talk for everyone. That's why we asked you. To me, the best thing about it is, I'm going to pick a couple of things, right? But I think they're kind of the same. One, the organization of the book, right?
That it is a very, it is, I think like, you know, I have a neighbor down the street who's just getting started with D&D. He's a young fellow who, you know, high school student who's getting started with D&D. I know his dad. And like, I would totally recommend this book to him.
I'd totally say like, hey, get the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and sit down, spend an hour, put your phone away, spend an hour and just skim read it and grab the sections that grab you and read it and pay attention to that first chapter. That is definitely what I think is best. And then kind of adding onto that, it has everything that he would need.
There's not a component where I look at it and go like, oh, I don't know how you would run the game because it doesn't have X. It has some surprising things that are missing. You know, a big one is it doesn't have a monster statistics by challenge rating chart, which was in the 2014 guide. A lot of other Game Master's guides have them. Level Up Advanced 5E has them. Tales of the Valiant has them.
My other book, Forge of Foes, has it.
What are the monster building guidelines like in?
They're terrible. So, yeah, let's see. I think it's in the... Yeah, creating a creature. Creating. Which is essentially re-skinning, right? And re-skinning is fantastic advice. I think it is the GM's super, the most useful lazy GM tool is re-skinning stuff other people have done. So that's good.
Minor alterations, size and creature type, ability scores, languages, proficiency, senses, spells, attacks.
resistance immunities and then it offers a bunch of traits and the trait list is not bad aversion to fire battle ready beast whisperer death you know so they're like kind of fun little things that you could add on to a creature some of them matter more than others like i don't think it matters that a creature sheds a bright light in a 10 foot radius but you're like you know but pack tactics like that's going to have a big effect so i think just you know disintegration when it dies it turns into dust i mean i guess that's okay but it's not exactly you know
So it's another one like, guess what? I have a whole book that I wrote with my friend Scott Gray and Teo Sabadia about how to make monsters for 5e. And now that book is still very valid. But it's a very short section and it doesn't it's not nearly as comprehensive as what the 2014 Dungeon Masters guide. Interesting. Which was flawed for other reasons, but it at least was there.
So a lot of people are like, well, maybe that'll be in the monster manual, but we're just going to say, maybe that's that.
But we're also saying, because like in the introduction, it tends to assume we're using published adventures. Maybe they're kind of assuming you're just using published monsters and tweaking them. The DMG isn't, they're not viewing it as a homebrewing book, I guess.
Yeah, right. And or even like a book written for designers. Yeah, right. That like, in some cases, having that in there, like designers generally follow those guidelines when they were making monsters for their own published work. But the dungeon master's guide is not a system reference document, right? It's not intended. It's not intended for you to be able to design monsters.
It's there to help you run a game. So I can see it. But I do also know many and I know I've done this because I'm using it with my own tables.
like that is a super useful improvisational tool right like the ability like i don't i need something i need to make a monster real quickly just going down and saying this is gonna be a cr5 monster and here's its stats i know people that never opened a monster manual they ran for years and they just used that to enable that table yeah yeah yeah so you know i i think it's you know that again is it critical no right and you know but it's yeah it's something that's
What's that? And if you also grabbed your attention and said, yeah, this is a really good part about this book.
Something else I really liked. So I haven't dived in deeply yet, but the Greyhawk section and the cosmology section, I think are really good description and the rules and the lore glossary are good ways to break up, to shake up the imagination of the reader. So, so much of it is like the technical stuff about game mastering.
but you also need inspiration to kind of get your head into the fantasy of it and get in and get your head into the fantasy of it in a specific way, not just, you know, general fantasy ideas, but specific ones of like, this is, you know, here is a city and here are the components of that city that can lead to adventure. Right.
That's something again, I'm not going to just sit here and plug with my books the whole day, but like, you know, building for me, like, how do you know? It's one thing to write a city. It's something else to write a city that is built specifically for players and characters to go on adventures. And from the skim read I did, it felt like it had that, right? It felt like that was good.
And the same with the cosmology section, like the cosmology section really makes your brain go wild with all of the ideas that it's got about what the cosmology is like. And again, thinking from the perspective of the neighbor kid. this is useful for him, right? Oh, this is what, you know, that's the other half of this.
Like half of it is understanding rules and knowing what the game is like and how to run a fun game. But then the other half is what is the lore and how do I get my head into where the neurons are connecting in my head to build the kind of lore that I can use to build my game? The only trick with that is like, if you're not using Greyhawk, it's not practically useful to you, right?
Like, you know, it gives you like, it's not a bad example of things, but it's, you know, if you either like, oh, I ran Greyhawk and now I don't need to run it again. Cause like I'm running a Greyhawk game now when I'm done, I'm probably not going back like any, you know, anytime soon. do I need this? You know, do I need this in it?
But on the other hand, you're like, they are the only ones that could have put this in their game master's guide. So I'm kind of glad they did. Right. No, yeah.
Yeah.
Like, you know, level up advanced 5e cannot put Greyhawk in their next book.
Right. So not legally, not legally.
Right. So they are the only ones who legally can. So I'm kind of glad that they put something in there that no other book can really put in.
Well, I guess this is not the Forgotten Realms pantheon they put in there, I guess. What's that? This is not the Forgotten Realms pantheon they put in there.
Yeah. I mean, you know, now they're fuzzing that all up, right? The boundaries between the pantheons of the various worlds are all kind of fuzzy. And now you saw a lot of Greyhawk gods and icons that showed up in Forgotten Realms because they wanted them to. Acererak was never a Forgotten Realms guy, and now suddenly...
tomb of annihilation has them el minister is in the lore glossary you know the harbors are all these setting the setting brands have very much been like mashed together well de-emphasized because the brand is now yeah just thunders and dragons it's not well and that whole idea of like oh our our home world is the multiverse but it is their their their kind of statement yeah
It's got Castle Ravenloft. It's got Companions of the Hall and the Company of the Seven. Two different groups. One's focused on Forgotten Realms. One is focused on Greyhawk. Both of them have descriptions in here. I think that's a fun thing.
Was there anything else that you felt was missing from the book?
what's the worst what's the baddest baddest I want to get into some of the areas where the advice where I feel like the advice like literally can hurt people's games I'm intrigued as to what you're going to say about that I was interested in areas where there was stuff missing and areas I don't of course
Well, yeah, I think, I think I've kind of hit, I think I kind of hit everything that like the, you know, not having a more fleshed out exploration system is one. Yeah. The monster challenge rating, the monster stats by challenge rating, I think is, is missing. Mm-hmm.
You know, again, nothing I think is critical to it, but there's a lot of advanced, and the big one is like lots of optional rules, right? Like this was an opportunity and the old DMG had it of like, hey, here's all a bunch of different ways. Now what's funny is like, well, they did put that in the 2014 guide.
And if I describe them to you, I bet you guys would be like, wow, I didn't know that was in there.
I think a lot of people are like that.
Yeah, like facing rules, right? Like, hey, there's a whole way to do it where you have facing rules in combat. There's a whole way, you know, the whole system for getting rid of skills and instead basing them on backgrounds and character classes as your proficiency bonus.
like there's a bunch of stuff in there that i think are really good and interesting and fun rules that nobody used you know nobody nobody the idea of replacing proficiency bonus with a proficiency die very similar to the expertise die that you have in in love up advanced 5e right only level advance ie has both in this case they just instead of a plus two proficiency it's a d4 d68 d10 d12 as you go up the proficiency line
So there's a lot of optional rules like that. And that's why I think what makes me happy about that is that means the old DMG is still a very useful book, right? Like you now have, you can almost imagine this is the dungeon master's guide and that is the dungeon master's guide too, right? That is the sequel to it.
Imagine if you will, it is the sequel that contains all of these other ways of looking at things. Now, of course, you've got redundant treasure sections and all kinds of other things going on in that usable space that you wouldn't have in another one. But I think it means if you own the old one, you're still good, right? It's not now a dead book.
It is a book that has a bunch of other stuff that you could use.
Is there anything about this book that kind of says you do need to buy it? Or could you just get by with the old one?
No, I think magic items, absolutely. Like, you know, I think, oh, and encounter building guidelines. And oh boy, I could, if we have another hour, I could talk about encounter building guidelines. But like... That's Peter's favorite topic. Those, you know, treasure and reward systems. There's a few things I think, like, you're going to need and you're going to want to use.
And if you're doing your prep, you're probably going to go to. Oh, well, other things that I really like. I really love their treasure system. So, like, this is another thing where I've read four books and all four Game Messers guys do it differently. And what's cool is you can kind of pick which one you dig the most and sort of go with that.
This one went for, you know, went for a session-based treasure system. reward where, you know, you are assumed to figure out what treasure you're going to award for the game you're going to run rather than here's a bigger hoard. The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, for example, has a treasure parcel that goes over a set of levels.
Like, hey, from levels one to three, this is all the treasure that you would want to give out. You can figure it all out ahead of time and then you can plop in those items as you go. Of course, Level Up Advanced 5e has all the various tables that you can roll on, which I think work really well as well.
And both by level. What's that? And wealth by level.
Yeah, right. And this one is basically saying, yeah, yeah. This one is basically saying, this is what you would give out per session. And what it does is like, here's the amount of gold they would get. And then you can, of course, replace gold with things like art and gems and other monetary treasure as you want.
And it's got tables for rolling for gemstones, but it doesn't have like those big cascading multi-level roll tables that both Level Up Advanced 5e has, but also the original 2014 Dungeon Masters got. Yeah. which are good, but it takes a long time to roll through all those tables.
Well, that's why you have tools, though, isn't it?
Yeah, that's why you have tools. Right, exactly. And I've been using a random... One funny, because of the way my brain works, for me to understand a treasure system, I need to write a generator to do it. And then I can see what the outputs look like. And so there's a tool called Perchance, which is an online way to set up a whole random generator system. And I've become pretty proficient in it.
So I've now, in the past week, wrote a generator for Tales of the Valiant and for 2024 D&D, just so I could compare the two of them. So I like that system a lot. I actually, I do like the encounter building guidelines in this. Just very briefly, they got rid of the whole multiplier thing. If any of you remember the way that it operated in 2014 D&D, it had this two dials.
I refer to it as like two dials that are connected through a hidden network behind it. So you don't know actually what's going to happen when you turn one dial, how the other dial is going to spin. Right. And that meant that building encounters using the 2014 guidelines had two major problems. One, it was super complicated and took you forever. And two, it wasn't accurate anyway.
So like, you know, and this one, they just got it to one table, which is experience points based. So you, you, you pick a difficulty that gives you a budget of experience points. And then you pick monsters with experience values equal to the total number of experience points without going over. And that should give you a battle. That's roughly at that, at that level.
Yeah.
The interesting bit is because it uses experience points, it's going to get nerdy. It's a logarithmic result, meaning that higher CR monsters are going to be much higher valued than low CR monsters.
And what this results in is that if you put big monsters against your characters, you're going to have fewer of them, or they're going to be at a lower challenge rating than if you put a lot of little monsters, in which case they're a high challenge rating.
And in some ways we looked, my Discord server, which has a bunch of nerds on it too, we were looking at it and like at level three, you could have four level three characters that have to face six level CR one tigers or lions who have like knock prone, do 12 damage. Like they're really hard.
And it was like, I have a feeling that like the difficulty of a battle is gonna feel very different depending on whether you're fighting a few higher CR monsters or a lot of lower CR monsters. Level Up Advanced 5e and the work that Paul Hughes did on this and the work that I did on the Lazy Encounter benchmark and that we did in Forge of Foes actually go into line. They're well lined up together.
And I think that this overlaps with that one. In other words, like, somebody building with one or the other isn't going to have something that's completely out of sync from one another.
Except that the ones that Level Up Advanced 5e uses and that I use, it's a linear curve, not a logarithmic curve, which means roughly the same number of challenge rating monsters are going to be the case, whether they're high or low. In this one, you're going to have a lot more lower ones and a lot fewer high ones.
And I think that that could result in battles that are either too easy for high CR monsters or too hard at low CRs. Interesting.
How does this... Okay, so it's a bit of an open secret, but XP to gain levels stopped working round about level 10. Has that been fixed?
I don't know. That's something I didn't look at, like how they do character. They have a character advancement section, and all I know is almost everyone I know uses milestones. Yeah. Very few people are using actual. They have an awarding experience points. I haven't looked at it, and I certainly haven't done any math to say what happens with it, but I think...
That's only because I only ever recommend milestones. I only ever use milestones. So it's like, ah, it's somebody else's problem.
Yeah, I use milestones. I think most people do.
Maybe they do. From the polls that I did, I think it was like, I don't know. I have to look. But it was the majority of people, the majority of DMs I polled in the thousands of GMs granted selection bias. Do DMs prefer giving out? They tend to use milestones, yeah. Because it's just like, who wants to do an income tax form?
Well, you can play it. It's preferred getting XP.
what's that they do because it's not arbitrary right it's not like oh you told me when i can level you know but my players are just kind of used to it it's like well whatever you know as long as i will often tell them i like the matt colville style of like tell them what they're what activity is on the horizon that they can do to get them to level so then they they have that sort of i know what goal i have to hit yeah so it doesn't feel like it's just someone's win if you if you once you light the second brack fire brazier you will get level 10
yeah or whatever and then they know like ah that's our goal yeah
Yeah.
Um, so all right. The bad bits. Come on. Yeah.
So the one that jumped, so I think that there's a couple, the one that jumped right out at me is, is not only do they have a, one of their five adventures has a quest NPC who betrays the characters, but they recommend that as a, or they don't recommend it, but they say like once per campaign, it's okay to have the, the patron of the characters betray them.
And I'm like, only Chris Perkins would say that, right? Like, You know, funny, funny that their last four published adventures had NPCs who betray the characters, including one that ruins the entire adventure. You just start expecting it at that point, though. Right. And think about this is for new game masters. So now you've got like wide eyed, super happy, eager to go.
And like, oh, this guy's you went the wrong way and you fueled the bad guy all this time. And it's like, well, now I hate you. And every NPC and they say it in here. If you do it, what they say is like, if you do it more than once, players will become jaded to your NPCs or to your quest. I'm like, no, they will do that on the first time. Like, if you do it once.
And there's so many other ways to have fun situations with NPCs where you know they're a bad guy, but you still have to work with them. Or you know they're a bad guy, but they don't know you know they're a bad guy and you're undercover.
There's so many cool ways to do it that gives agency back to the players that they could have taught in here early because there are things in movies and books and TV shows that do not work well in a role-playing game.
and there are things that do and separating those things out is actually important to say like i know you're walking in with the idea that like you're hercule perot and you're not going to figure out the mystery until the very end until your players figure it out in the first scene and now what do you do right so like Yeah. So that it's in two different spots in the book are, are one of them.
One of the adventures has, they have those five adventures.
So we're talking about those adventures. Yeah. Given that probably the purpose of putting adventures in a DMG is to show you how to do specific things. It is. Do they do a good job of that? No. Okay. My opinion. So, you know, yeah.
i i i so when we say adventures we are we are definitely like a lowercase a because they are like i mean just just for funsies the text editor and tell you exactly how many words it is it's small right these are small adventures they said that they're a half a page and when i heard that like they were going to use half page adventures yeah 432 words okay Right?
Those are, and that's like, I just grabbed one of those. They're all about that size. Yeah. And you know, I bill myself of course, as sly flares, the lazy dungeon master and the premise of my, my book return of the lazy dungeon master is preparing as little as you need in order to run a game. And this is too little, right? Like, like you, I, I feel like you need more than this.
And I also feel like the, the things that one should be focused on are probably not necessarily lined up with the things that they have in here.
that there are there are parts of it that are just missing and a big one is like what are you know the one that i pitch a lot is like what are the characters going to discover when they're going through the adventure right what are the things what are they going to learn and don't bury that in a scene keep that separate from the scene so that you know they can learn it wherever they go now i wouldn't expect them to pick that up because that is like a thing pretty unique to the style that i that i propose
But, like, I read these and I just, like, maybe a good GM that can improv heavily could run with this and run a full adventure. But I think there's probably more here that they would need. And I think somebody who thinks that this is as little as they need are going to feel distraught when they hit, you know, when they run a game and they realize, like, ooh.
I was hoping there'd be, like, an adventure that showcases combat, an adventure that showcases exploration.
They do have that, yeah. So, like, they hit different styles, right? you know, they're, they're, they're all different levels. They're first through, I forget what the highest level one here is, but there's one that's completely social, right? There's one, there's one that's all about like you're at a ball and you're trying to discover stuff at the ball. Right.
So that, that's kind of, that's kind of neat. And, and, you know, then they, they have sort of, Different types you know the you know what are the different stages of an adventure they have one that has like exploration and here's a random table of things that you might run into while you're exploring.
So i think they they do a pretty decent job of of showcasing different styles of adventures and not all of these have the same format for every single one of them.
I am, you know, happy to see an adventure style in a format that hammers on the point that the notes that you need to run your game are not the same as a published adventure you would buy off the shelf, which I think a lot of people don't grab. I think a lot of GMs, particularly newer GMs, I've seen this. write adventures that are like full adventures.
They write flavor text and they write all their stuff. It's like, do you need that when you're running it? Like a bullet will tell you, you know, you know what the adventure is. All you need is the bullet to remind you of the thing you thought of so that you can spew it out when it's time for you to run your game.
And I think this does a good job of saying like, you know, hey, published adventures are these great big 32 page or 192 page books with all this stuff in it. But here's, you know, as little as you need to actually run one. So
On one side, I don't necessarily feel, and I haven't run them, I haven't grabbed one and actually played it, and I certainly haven't seen new DMs grab one of these and run with it. For all I know, it's correct. For all I know, this could be fine.
But for someone who's thought a lot about it, for someone who started off by saying you really only need three things in order to run a game, and then realizing that wasn't enough, I think there's more that they could have done to say, what are all the components of a game that you're going to run? Okay.
So it sets sort of, um, false expectations of the amount... I, I, I wonder.
Yeah, I mean, I don't, I, I, you know, I hear, I hear so much of, like, the, you know, those of us who have been playing for 40 years or whatever, lamenting the, the trials of a new game master that we don't actually know, and we've never actually seen them run, and we don't know what their experience level is, but we assume, because X is true, that means they're hosed.
Like...
You know, I think like, you know, again, GMs could be watching YouTube videos and picking up everything they need, and maybe it's fine. And we could just be wrong, right? Like, just because we came from wherever we came from, and we've studied whatever he said, it doesn't mean we're right about, like, it doesn't mean I'm right about any of this, right?
So there's some things I think I'm definitely right about the there's they have these new called in spelled magic items. This is a minor kind of a minor one, but I think it's indicative of something.
So they've been spelled magic items, which is something, you know, another lazy DM technique that I love, which is take a magic item like a plus one sword, put a spell on it that they can use once a day. And it's a way to give a fighter a way to have a wizard spell that they can use once. In this one, the inspelled weapon has six charges and recharges every day.
So imagine if you gave a spellcaster a magic item that gave them six additional spell slots. It would be busted. And it's one thing to give a fighter a sword that can cast Burning Hands once. But now you've turning him to burning hands guy when he can cast it six times. Right.
And it's like, I don't know why they cast it more often than the wizard can cast.
It's an at will. Right. And so it's like, well, that's better than all my other abilities. Right. Like it's it's it has less limits on him than the limits on the character abilities that he's got, which usually you can't do six times. So I felt like that was an easy one that they just completely whiffed.
And Baldur's Gate 3, which they consulted on, have these kind of items, and they only work once. They work once, and then you have to take a long rest, and you get it back again. So I don't know why they thought six charges was good. Another example, which is a 2014 item that is so broken, I've never rewarded it. I've only rewarded it once.
I was like, well, that was a mistake, is the Instrument of the Bards. which is like an uncommon magic item that gives you like access to like 12 spells and you can, and you can use it. It's like, it's essentially like one character carrying another character in their hands. Right. Cause it's so much stuff and they didn't fix it in this one. They can still cast spells, you know?
I mean, it's just, it's like handing a wizard spell book only now you can cast them all right out of the book on top of all the ones you normally cast.
Yeah.
The crafting rules are another one where God's helped the GM that uses these crafting rules because you can build an uncommon magic item for 200 gold and no other check. And I was like, man, you're going to be... If you offer that up, you're going to be swimming in busted items, right? Like your players... Everyone's going to have the crazy stuff. So I...
It was, that's another, like a half a page thing, the crafting rules. Again, I love you guys.
The level up advanced 5e version is way better where not only do you have good crafting rules and specific prices on specific items based on their value within the range of the gear, but also have the unique thing you have to go get in order to make that item, which is crucial for not having 15 instruments of the bonds.
the crafting components yeah right you you know you basically take the crafting component and that becomes the thing you have to go to the quest to go get and that way you put a limit on the craft ability of magic items so so that was an easy thing that they yeah they previewed the crafting rules in the video and we talked about it like two or three weeks ago and yeah they did seem quite quite vague
They're very, it's, it's, it's like a half a page, right? And it's, then it's not, yeah, it's not, I, I, I have a feeling if you were to put this into your game, you're asking for trouble, like, because then your players are going to do it all the time. Like at what point is like, well, we shouldn't even go on missions anymore. Right.
Like, you know, by the time you're level five, you're gonna have so much gold, you can make as many uncommon items as you want and then go sell them. Right. And now you got, now you got a simulator game instead of, right. Right. So, yeah, I think, I think that that is a. It's almost like the costs of them are off by an order of magnitude. If it was 2,000 gold, maybe it's more reasonable.
But even then, I would still tie it to, I'll still have to go get this special gemstone that can only be found in the crypt of the Lich King. Yeah.
but it's a built quest hook and that's more story, more fun, more adventures.
And it doesn't bust the economy of the game because the reality is you could have put the magic item down in the loot, right? And they could have just gotten it without crafting it, but instead you're making it more interesting.
Yeah, and also by doing that you're putting a gate on it for the... GM to use if they need to.
Exactly. They got, they got the dial, right? Like I can control, I can control this, the, the, the income that's coming in.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. But overall, it sounds like it's definitely one of the best GMGs for a while. Like the, the fourth edition DMG was actually pretty good.
Yeah. A lot of people love the fourth edition. I, I kind of don't remember it. Like it's been long enough.
It had a lot of advice in it. It was very advice. Yeah. Yeah. It was pretty good.
I actually picked it relatively recently.
Yeah.
Very good.
Yeah. The first edition DMG. Who remembers that?
Yep. That one, I actually have more experience with that one recently. It's quite a tough read, though. Yeah, right, right. All that Gagaxian prose. It's quite dense, isn't it? Yeah, right, and justified text and everything else. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny you were talking about, like, what did we learn when we did it?
And I was like, well, I started with second edition, and I have all the versions of Game Master Guides of all previous versions on my laptop here, and I've just popped it open. I was like, do I remember anything about this book? Yeah, yeah. When I ran my adventures when I was 14 or 15, you know, did I ever use any of this? And it's like, ah, it's kind of familiar.
I don't know that I really hung onto it too tightly, but I was like,
Yeah.
That's probably magic items. Like that's probably what I focused on.
Well, this was definitely better than the 2014 one.
Yeah, well, from the perspective of following through with the thing that it should do of being a guide for Dungeon Masters, it is definitely a better guide for Dungeon Masters than 2014. What I like though is there are still things about the old one that are still useful for those of us who have both.
And I think like somebody who really got into the game and wanted to kind of fill their own toolbox with stuff, really could get a lot of value by not only picking up like the 2014 guide, but also these other game masters guide trials and treasure and the tales of value game masters guide.
And then of course, expanding on there's now dozens and dozens and hundreds of really good game master guides, you know, cubicle sevens books on, on life well lived and, and you know, their, their stuff like that, like there's so much way that we can expand the GMs, uh, pile of useful stuff.
Yeah. And when it comes to advice, not even just D&D books. Yeah. There's so many good sort of good advice and ideas in different games. I think it was, was it you last week, Peter, who said that the concept of a session zero, which is very familiar to all of us, and pretty much everyone does it in their games, but it's never mentioned in D&D because it's not something.
It is now, yeah. Oh, is it in then? Yeah, it's in both books. So there's a session zero description in the player's handbook, and there's a session zero...
session zero one and and you know including stars and not stars and wishes but including lines and veils and oh right because we were wondering about like yeah that is it wasn't in the table of contents yeah it is not in the table of contents but there is definitely a they even have like a game expectations worksheet that you can download that has like the theme and flavor potentially sensitive elements you know hard hard limits and soft limits
So that stuff is in there.
That stuff is in there. It's a little funny that they don't reference who came up with those things, right? And it's like, those were... I guess when you're a billion-dollar company, you cannot reference the people who came up with these concepts originally.
But it would have been nice if they had mentioned, like, hey, by the way, this is who came up with the X card, this is who came up with lines and veils and stuff like that.
But they do cover them, yeah. One thing I was wondering, perhaps... I may have missed it and heard barely, but do they have a concept like extended skill challenges or clocks?
No, neither of those are in there.
Yeah. Right. So, so everything just comes down. Rules is written.
Yeah. Right. Right. It's just ability. Yeah. It's just ability checks. Right. And, and I'm, you know, and I'm, I'm on that side of it. Right. Like I, it was funny, like the other day we were talking about the, the, the countdown clocks that are inside trials and treasure. I can't remember. I think it's in the adventures guide, right? The A5E adventures guide.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
and i had to dig for him because that book is like 950 pages but i did find it and yeah they don't have anything like that and i i really so so one of my big philosophies with a lot of this stuff and and i think this supports pretty well is the teach them how to fish idea that instead of like giving a a new structure for everything or a new set of mechanics for everything like teaching gms what they can do with an ability check
And how to let those cascade and how to let them, you know, and they have a whole thing in here. It's the first time I think where they talk about failing forward, right? Or, or, or using an ability check and not necessarily, it's not just a failure success state that it can be a dial. It can be an analog thing of like how well or how poorly somebody did.
Yeah.
And I think like those are the things where if you give them to a game master and teach them the value of like mixing the in-world fiction and the narrative from the player and the description of what they're doing with an ability check together to come up with like the way that the story ebbs and flows is more useful than like here's a structure for a skill challenge of like eight successes before three failures and.
You know, because God, I see that misused way more often than I see it used well.
Well, that's where the clocks, we mentioned John.
Yeah, right. Like blades in the dark clocks. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think are great. Really useful tool. Yeah. Yeah. I much prefer. Yeah. I much prefer. Yeah. I think, I guess.
Yeah. Just having just general proficiency in the manipulation of the core rules in different configurations is probably more valuable. Yes. But also some examples would definitely help with that, wouldn't they? Just an example saying an ability check doesn't have to be just one. It could be three. You could ask for some different ones from different characters. You could ask for the, you know...
Right. Yeah. They start to frown. Right. You failed your charisma check. They start to frown.
Yeah.
It doesn't mean they've stabbed you in the face yet, but the conversation is going in a southern path that's going to take you somewhere to get it back on. Yeah. Yeah. They do. They have a whole like resolving outcome section. There's a lot. There was one table in here. I'm trying to find it. But they had a really good table of what things meant when you would roll certain checks.
I think maybe it was in the narration aspect where they actually, I think it is, I think it's in the early part, where they give you examples of the kinds of ways that you would describe certain things. And I thought that that was a really good example I thought they had good examples of how to get your head into the fiction of the game and describe things from the way that they are in the world.
I thought that those examples, I can't find them offhand, but those examples I thought were really good.
One thing we were wondering about, the chase rules. I've heard they're not good.
I almost said a dirty word. Oh! I don't... So it's the number two item in the DM toolbox. And it isn't... So it's not terribly long. No, I take that back. It's pretty long. It's not bad. And what's funny is sort of like skill challenges, chases are like really... Every time I've seen them in play are miserable. And my wife, we went to a game hall con recently.
And my wife played in a game with a game designer, a well-known game designer, who ran a chase. And my wife knowing, she and I talk about this stuff all the time. And so she's well aware of chase issues. And before she even starts, she says, is there anything we can do other than making the same ability check over and over in this? And this well-experienced professional game master said, nope.
And it was like, you can't cast, because the problem with the chase is like, what if they dimension door and punch you in the face? There's so many ways to stop a chase before it even begins and players want to do that. And instead you're like, no, you're just going to gain exhaustion. You roll and you dash and you get exhaustion and I'll roll on these.
So it's got like complication rules and stuff like that. The rules are not worse than any other chase rules I've seen. And they do things like a chase participant can make attacks and cast spells against other creatures. So in this case, you can do that. And the only thing that they limit is like, you can't normally make opportunity attacks and here's why. You're like, okay, that's reasonable.
But I don't know. I just, to me... The problem with a chase, there's so many problems with chases. One of them is that usually they're predetermined before they've happened. So that like a player's like, at this point, there will be a chase.
And my favorite example of this is Waterdeep Dragon Heist, where there's one whole chapter that's this big ass 10 stage chase in order to get the Stone of Galore, the MacGuffin for the adventure. And at one point it says like,
there's a there's a little sub box that says if the stone of galore is captured before the chase goes it actively works to try to get away from the characters and and get back on track to the chase and you're like oh my god like the the macguffin is fighting against you to make sure you get back on board yeah so it's like the the case itself is the goal rather than the means to the end it's like whatever direction you're going everywhere is a chase it's a quantum chase right and like
that to me like having good ideas of like how you would run a chase if it happens in your game where guys are running away and the characters want to go after them what are some things you could do that and i think this kind of gets close to that of like hey here's a toolkit for doing that but i would for me i would i would basically say like you do not plan a chase you you you you have tools to help you when they occur but if you're planning a chase you're railroading you're railroading a scene time right so that's my thought yeah but they're here
Yeah. I mean, I was trying to think what we were saying about it, but we sort of saw, was it a preview, a video preview or something? Of Chasing? I can't remember now.
It was a written online thing. We had a look at what was currently there in the 2014 one, I think.
Oh, we looked at 2014 Chasing. Yes, that was it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It wasn't there. Yeah.
I don't know that they're much different. Like I looked at those because again, I, I saw, I think, I think it was, I think my wife has been in two adventures where this happened, where she was looking at the chase where you're not allowed to cast any spells. And and I was like, is that what the rules say? And I was like, no, you can cast spells in the rules.
But it's sort of like, well, if you're allowing spell, the reason why they don't allow spells is because they immediately circumvent the chase.
Yeah.
And that's because chases can be circumvented and you should be prepared for that. Right. Yeah.
I mean, that's the nature of magic and role-playing games. Right. Yeah. Circumference plot. Right.
I guess the answer is don't be determined to run a train.
You know.
Right. Right. Like why it's, it's such a narrow, it's such a narrow scene type that why, why define that one in particular? I guess it adds enough that they thought it was worth another couple of pages in this book.
Well, I feel it's like a mode of play. I don't really feel that the three-person assets really captures the subtleties of what you're doing. Right. I think in the second edition, they said you've got combat, then you've got exploration, then you've got downtime. That sort of mode. You've got Lancer. It says you're either in a mech
you're not on a mech and you're playing different games yeah yeah yeah with different rules yeah it feels like level up does help you bring that out but it's basically dnd so it feels like that should be an assist you apply to dnd i feel like a chase is actually a mode within the game
mini game yeah it's just not yeah not one that i care i mean like i only do because i've been on the player side and i've had friends my wife's been on the player side it's lame right they don't like it i wish i had my 20 minutes back right i wish we'd fight or something else so i can't think of any epic dnd moment i've had which has included this chase
Yeah, or I've had a chase that you were like, wow, that was awesome. I mean, I'm sure it happens. Again, there's probably other GMs that do it.
Probably more so in narrative games, I think, probably rather than more mechanical ones like D&D.
I guess for me, it's more like it's the players running away that has the opportunity for... Yeah, that's different.
Oh, yeah. Great way of handling that. Yeah, the 13th age of the... Like, you can leave at any moment, right? Like, if every player agrees... the assumption is you manage to collect any downed characters and get away from it at a story, you know, with a story effect, right?
That's what I'm saying. You're changing the mode of the thing. Like, doing a chase in initiative order is a bad idea. You should not do it. Right. Just don't. Like, oh, if you can get to the map.
Don't pre-plan a chase.
If you can get to the map and the edge in initiative order, no, just don't. Just cut to a chase, a different frame of rules now applies, I would say. Error so far. I'll get my hobby horse.
There's there's two other things I want to cover real quickly. Yeah. So so one, like a big topic is bastions. I haven't looked at them at all. But my friend Teo Sabadea has done two YouTube videos where he dove deep into bastions. And I would definitely recommend if you want a very smart designers opinion of he's thought about it ever since the playtest has come out.
He spent a lot of time looking at them. He was one of the people that got like the early PDF previews. So he's been spending a lot of time thinking about them. And he did two videos on the good and the bad of bastions. And I'm sure he has. I haven't even finished watching his videos yet, much less read this section of the book. But I would definitely check.
Is it generally this is good or generally this is bad?
It's got problems. And, you know, I think a couple of problems that he and I have talked about. One is that like the intent of a bastion was to be a money sink and instead it generates money. So it's like, all we do is now we have more money and now what do we spend our more money on? And so there's a little bit of issue of that.
And then there's a lot of like, you know, like they're, they're just generators. I think this is, I'm, I'm paraphrasing. I don't know if it's true, but, and, and I almost don't want to like dive in, but like, I think they can also sort of like the crafting rules be generators of items that you don't necessarily want to have in the economy of your game. Right.
This is the sort of like, I have 50 healing potions in a bag. I never need to worry about healing again because I can just constantly generate new healing potions. I don't know if that's true exactly, but I think the way that it generates stuff is probably too valuable for the intent, which was a nice place to put your money, right?
hire a staff and i've i've run my own kind of versions of bastions which are as you imagine very rules light but they cost a lot of money like you know you know you want to hire somebody and then again level level up advanced 5e has a fantastic way of setting up bastions and strongholds and things like that with the like you works what's that and public works don't forget that you can put bridges and so forth yeah yeah great the life good social programs yeah
And, and yeah, the idea of like, how do, how do, you know, how do you pay for the people that are doing it and all that kind of stuff, but they're all costs. Right. And, and, and it should be a cost because part of the reason you're doing this to get money out of the, the player's economy where they're like, I've got 67,000 gold and I can't buy anything.
Yeah.
Oh, you can, you can hire some people to make a little, uh, art studio for you.
There was also some talk about bastions being off limit to the DM as well. And I don't know how strongly that's emphasized in the book or not.
No, I don't think so. I mean, there was that idea of like, you can do a Bastion turn and kind of leave it to the players to do what they're going to do with it. I think that's one of the intents is that now there's a bit of the, you know, they call this like the lonely fun, right?
Like if you're a player and you're really into the game, but you can't be there for the session or you just want to play between the week, you can do Bastion stuff. off your turn. And I think that's fine. I didn't, I mean, they are an optional rule, right? It's very clear up front that the GM decides if this is even in the game at all. So, you know, it's not, it's not in the player's guide.
It's in the, it's in the game master's guide or the dungeon master's guide. Yeah. But it's, yeah. You decide whether they're available at all. It's the very first sentence of the second paragraph of the thing. The other thing I want to, I wanted to throw out is they have a, I think this is really cool. A big appendix filled with maps and the map by Dyson logos.
So I am a huge fan of Dyson logos maps. I think he, I think he is one of like the, the absolute heroes of this hobby who put out 1300. Maps for free that, that he's been working on for like the last 15 years.
And the idea that I love, love, love his maps.
I know I that's all I use. Right. And I think they're fantastic. And like 600 of them in a under commercial use. So that means even as publishers, you can get we use them.
We've seen loads of times.
Yeah, they're fantastic. And so Wizards commissioned him to do a set of sort of in a bunch of them. I'll count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, 12, 13, 14, 15 maps. Sorry, you're going to have to keep that in the podcast. 15 different maps that he put in here that show everything from like, you know, caravan encampments, crossroad villages, dragon's lair, key roadside in ships, everything.
What's funny. I always like the ship one because I know he hates doing ships. So like he's mentioned, there's only, I asked him one time, like, you know, you only have like three ship maps on out of 1300 maps. He's like, I hate doing ships. I only do ship mats. I only do them when like wizards makes me do them for like ghost assault marsh. Right. It's like, I just don't, you know, I don't know why.
But he's like a true professional map designer that understands like the Janelle J Quay style of map design of loop backs and level changes and secret passages and all these kinds of things that make maps really engaging. He's got that wired into his design side. So the maps that he builds are really, really good maps.
and what's interesting is thinking about like how much wizards to the coast likely commissioned him to make these maps and then multiply that amount by the 1400 maps that are available on his website and it's like millions of dollars right like the value the value of those maps are are very very high so i'm really glad to see them and i think one of the reasons that they chose maps like his
Which I think, you know, obviously extremely talented in the design that he does, but also the kind of thing that like somebody could do.
It's like a hand-drawn style, isn't it?
It's like a hand-drawn style. And so it gives GMs the idea that you don't have to be Mike Schley making the level of maps that he's got. And by the way, Mike Schley's Greyhawk map is in here. So you can see what a, you know, an artist's map is like, but you're not like thrown out like, well, I can never do a map like that. You instead get to see these and go, ah, so that's what stairs look like.
goes yeah um so i thought that was a really smart move on their part and yeah it's maps that you feel that you could potentially do yourself yeah i mean maybe not as well as no right like that cross hatching yeah that cross hatching is going to take me an hour and a half yeah but like you know it still gives you an idea of like oh that's what a coffin looks like you know and i could draw a coffin on my little wetteries that i'm at my yeah i can get a pencil and some graph paper and i can do that yeah yeah
right so i was i was really and and also they are directly useful right it's the kind of thing where like you're stuck for a session i want to run an adventure i guess i'm going to grab that dragon's lair map but instead of dragon's lair it's going to be an evil cult layer and and now i can use that map like like having maps like that in there in the book 15 of them that you can use i'm sad because the 2014 version had a map that i had designed
So it was my one little claim to fame was that one of the maps that was in that book was a map that myself and Scott Grant and T.S. Abadieh designed for Lair of the Dracolich during the late fourth edition days. And so, no, that's not in there. But these are really great.
Yeah, yeah. And also, there's so many more of his maps, like you just said, online.
So if you've got those 15, just go and grab one of the 3,000. And I regularly go and download them all. Because I'm always worried that that site, like WordPress one day is going to be like, yeah, your bandwidth is too high. And they're going to kill it. And I'm going to lose access to 1,200, 1,500 maps. So I'm always like, I'm keeping these local. So I've got my own little local version.
Right. Hey, it is now four o'clock. We need to wind up. I need to eat something.
You have exhausted my thoughts on Tanja Master's Guide.
So, yeah.
It's been absolutely fascinating. I have been involved. So, yeah, it's been...
Yeah, I really appreciate you letting me come on and talk all about it because obviously I have thoughts.
It is always a pleasure, Mike. You know you're always welcome on. Oh, thank you. So next week we will have Paul Hughes on and Paul is going to talk about Monstrous Menagerie 2, which launches on Kickstarter on Tuesday. Please go and back it because we want this one to do well.
Yeah.
I think it is going to do well, but we want this to do. And, you know, we realize it's very late in the year and it's coming up the whole and all this sort of stuff, the timing and stuff like that. So please go back. It would be wonderful if you did.
I'm backing it. And it's really good. It's so good.
It's so good. And if you didn't get the first Monstrous Menagerie, you can pick that one up at the same time.
You should definitely, when the Monster Manual comes out next year, have Paul on to talk about that because I can't wait for him to do his deep analysis of the monsters.
Well, I think what we're quite pleased about is from what we've seen of the new Monster Manual, it does look like Monstrous Menagerie 1 still has value.
It will always have it because like, you know, we're not in a stage where we have to follow what they do anymore.
Yeah.
IV is open. You can, you know, one thing I'm sorry, you know, get him out of soapbox, but it's a soapbox in your favor that, you know, one thing I really love is in the area of monsters.
We have everything from like flea mortals, super crunchy, you know, super like tactical focus monsters to, you know, forge a foes, which is like, look them up on this table and just run them as is or super fast or add stuff to them. We have, you know, the approach that the Monsters Menagerie took. It's my favorite monster book, right? The Monsters Menagerie has.
We have the way that Tales of Valiant. And the monsters look pretty significantly different across all of these different versions. And yet they're all still playable as 5e monsters. They're all compatible, yeah. They're all compatible. They're all based on the same rule system. That means as game masters, not only can we pick the one we like, we can mix and match them to our heart's content.
Well, that's the thing.
You want a goblin, you've now got...
goblins yeah it's like five goblins yeah yeah and they're all slightly different to each other you can use the same encounter five different that's right and they're just different absolutely right right so i don't i think i think the the the need the need to kind of follow their lead i've seen too many designers that are already going that way where they've changed their monster stat block design to fit the new design which we had so many people saying to us so how is how is it going to change your level like not um why would it not
Right.
Although we did choose, we did like adopt one idea. You know, they pre-calculated initiative in the new ones.
Yeah, right.
I thought that was a nifty little tool.
I think that's great. And we've added that in. And that's fantastic. Like the idea of like, oh, hey, here's a cool idea. Because I think, I believe this is true, that between the Monstrous Menagerie and the Monstrous Menagerie 2, you went from the style that Wizards had done a bit during the Avernus, whatever the Avernus book was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh, no, I don't think so.
Are you still doing full spell, full spell descriptions like the menagerie one?
Do you know what? I don't want to say for certain right now, cause I'd have to look and I'm going to in front of me, but I don't think so.
Gotcha. Okay.
I don't think so.
So, you know, yeah, all that, the idea that like, yeah, we have all these different ways that we can bring in and we can pick the monsters that we like, you know? Because God knows his GMs were always like, well, that's not how I would have done it. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Meta game this.
Oh, I definitely get it. Like when I was pulling out like cobalt presses books, you know, they had a name for it called KPBS, which has a naughty word in it. So I won't say what the B. Yeah. But they always felt like, like, you know, Kobo press stuff hits harder and does weirder things that they're not used to. So they'd see me pull out the book. I'm like, Oh, like everybody get on their a game.
This is going to be some serious stuff. So it's kind of fun that different, different books and boy, I'll tell you the, the tales of the valiant monster vault, those monsters hit like freight trains, like really, really hard. So, yeah. So it's, it's neat to have all of these sort of different styles and that even different feelings among the book that you're choosing.
Like, yeah, no, yeah.
I think it's great.
I think it's awesome. You've got a squad of five goblins and each of those five goblins is completely, oh, it's a little harder to run.
I don't know if I'd recommend doing that.
But just conceptually, it's kind of cool because they're just like different type goblins of the same, you know? Hashtag not all goblins.
I think Monstrous Menagerie is quite a good starter book for GM. Yes, I think so. All that, all the setup, the foreshadowing, it's all in. It sounds like it might be worth picking up Tales of the Valiant monster book for just,
giving some away boy yeah and especially like challenge rating 1 to 3 like their CR 1 to 3 monsters are just they you know the average damage that I calculate for like how tough a monster is is roughly about 7 damage per challenge rating and they're hitting like 15 or 16 well I've always felt the wizards monsters Yeah, they were too weak. They overcompensated for other abilities.
I can see us jumping into next week's topic. Shall we save some of these?
Save it for Paul. He knows way better than us. I can't wait to hear Paul's take on all this.
Shall I call time on this week's topic? Because we're here talking about the DMG. I feel that we've done that.
I think we should call full time on this podcast. In fact, we should go and enjoy our weekends.
And we know we've got plenty we want to talk about next week.
I can't wait to hear it.
All right. Well, thank you, Mike. Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on. I always love being on. And this is a topic, obviously, that I'm very interested in. I knew you'd like talking about this. Absolutely.
Anyway, let's get out of here, shall we?
Thanks a lot, everyone.
Thank you, everyone. And we'll see everyone next week. Same time, same place.