The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
D&D 2024 Tool DCs – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 23 Sep 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:16 D&D & RPG News: Roll20 Packages for Doctors Without Borders 03:04 Kickstarter Spotlight: Pirate Borg 09:06 DM Tip: Run I6 Ravenloft with Shadowdark on Halloween 10:45 D&D & RPG News: Free D&D 2024 Rules with All Twelve Classes 13:20 D&D & RPG News: D&D Adventurer's League Moves to D&D 2024 26:13 D&D & RPG News: D&D 2024 PHB Available Physically and on Four VTTs 33:55 DM Tip: D&D 2024's Handling of Tools and DCs 41:02 DM Tip: Two Words for Increasing Combat Challenge 51:06 Patreon Question: What's My Next Campaign? 53:26 Patreon Question: Upward and Downward Beats in a Campaign 57:46 Patreon Question: Why Switch to Obsidian? Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Pirate Borg Down Among the Dead Ravenloft with Shadowdark Video Ravenloft with Shadowdark Article D&D Beyond D&D 2024 Free Rules Includes All Twelve Classes D&D Adventures League Updates D&D PHB 2024 on Foundry D&D PHB 2024 on Fantasy Grounds D&D PHB 2024 on Roll20 Roll20 Characters Midgard Dragon Empire Campaign Video
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to talk about the Roll20Con Doctors Without Borders Bundle 1 and 2. We're going to look at the Pirate Borg Down Among the Dead Kickstarter. We're going to talk about running Ravenloft, i6 Ravenloft, using Shadow Dark. We are going to look at the new addition of 12 classes, all 12 classes, to the D&D 2024 free rules available on D&D Beyond.
Wizards of the Coast announced new updates to the D&D Adventurers League program. We're going to talk about that today. We're going to look at the D&D Player's Handbook being available on many different platforms. We're going to talk about... Let's see. That...
We're gonna talk about how the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook is handling DCs for things like tools and what it really means, and a single phrase, single six words earlier on in the book that kind of change everything about tools. And we're gonna talk about the two-word solution for increasing encounter difficulty. There's only two words you need
Two things, two words that can help you dramatically change encounter difficulty and increase encounter threat. And we're going to cover more questions from the September 2024 Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. This weekend, Roll20Con...
was going on i actually watched they had a seminar yesterday where they were talking about their new character builders they were talking about the new games that they have there how they are integrating demi plane into roll20 they showed off the dnd 2024 character builder which we're going to talk about in a little bit they also however have put out two bundles for doctors without borders and i am one of the one of my products is inside the bundle i wanted to talk about that but also show off the other things you get
So these are very, very good deals. $25 packages, $190 worth of material that you get. A lot of sort of starter set things, the Cyberpunk Edgerunners mission kit. You get Punk Apocalyptic, the entire RPG for Punk Apocalyptic. Punk Apocalyptic. No. Apocalyptic. Punk Apocalyptic.
bingo i'm not going to say that again by robert schwab uh is available in this in this pack dragonbane the entire dragonbane core set is in this bundle as well and look at that sly flourish is fantastic adventures normally 15 bucks you get it as part of this this package there is traveler explorers edition which i think is like an introduction to traveler if you're
That includes the Doctor Who RPG, Knights Black Agents, a whole bunch of different things that you get in all of these. Again, very good deal for this case, $207 worth of products that you're getting for $25. And your money is going to a good cause, which is Doctors Without Borders. So check out those two bundles. I have links to both of the bundles in the show notes so you can check them out.
These are the Roll20Con level up bundles one and two, which where the profits from it all go to support Doctors Without Borders. So a good cause for some awesome products.
pirateborg so first a disclaimer the fine folks at free league sent me a copy of the original pirateborg i have it and i can tell you it is a gorgeous book it is a really really cool looking book they now have look at funded in two minutes everybody wants this uh they have now put out a new set the pirateborg down among the dead kickstarter which includes a three adventure anthology book a starter set a community content book and a whole bunch of other accessories and
They have a ton of different packages, a ton of different accessories, including for people that have never done anything with Pirate Borg. What is Pirate Borg? So Pirate Borg is a version of Morkborg. Morkborg is the Swedish hard death metal, I guess, black metal RPG that came out a few years ago. I have done a previous show where we talked about it is a extremely grim, extremely stylized RPG.
brutal rpg based on very old school style rules it's incredibly fast to roll up a character characters die all the time and that sort of thing and pirate borg is an extension or you know builds upon the principles of morke borg but in a fantasy version of sort of caribbean america in the 1800s
So you I've actually played in a pirate board game at a recent convention where we did some terrible things. We were we were really, you know, halfway through. We're like, are we the bad guys? Like, I'm pretty sure we're the bad guys. These people are just living their lives and we destroyed their entire island by stealing their precious artifact. So, well, maybe they were bad.
I'm sure they did some bad stuff in the end, but no, it didn't seem like it. So there is now, so the pirate Borg game itself is very, very cool. One of the folks here on Twitch mentioned that it has the best ship ship to ship combat rules that they have seen in an RPG, but very straightforward game, very easy to get into.
And if you have not done anything with pirate Borg, this is obviously a great set to, This is a great set to start with because you can get the starter set and you could get the core book and you can get all kinds of other things, tons of accessories.
And I'll tell you the product quality from what I saw from PirateBorg itself, I got like their DM screen and their book and pre-gen characters and all that kind of stuff. And it's just gorgeous. It's really, really gorgeous stuff. The book is really, really well put together and really outstanding. Graphic design is fantastic. And not only does this Kickstarter include previews of their stuff,
including a like a preview of down among the dead itself if you want to see what the layout is like if you want to read some of the material this one is a 33 page 33 page sample that shows the kind of material that you get in this book but they have multiple previews of things they have a pirate borg preview which shows you what the game itself is like the kind of random tables that it's got the sort of design that it's got what the story is about all this kind of stuff
That's that's available there. And there is the cabin fever preview. Cabin fever is a third party creator contest that they did over an itch. They put them together and you can see what that looks like as well. There is no reason I can't get that on the screen. There we go. This one includes a song, right? How often do you get an RPG that includes song notes for you to sing aloud to your players?
But here they are. There's no reason not to go check out this Kickstarter and go download the free previews and take a look at them and see what you got. Look at that. Art is fantastic. Really, really cool. Really, really cool stuff.
If you like Mark Borg, if you like old school games, if you like seafaring, dark seafaring adventures, and you want really cool designs and stuff like that, this is an outstanding Kickstarter to check out. Watch your wallets because the preview, the costs for some of this stuff goes up very high, very quickly.
So I think if you are just starting out and want everything, the new captain set is 180 bucks, but gives you all the physical books of everything. Poster maps, dice kits, dice bags, GM screens. You can think of this as like a, you know, I think, I think it goes up in there. The Kraken set. which includes everything that's got all the dice sets, token packs, naval combat packs.
This is sort of their beetle and grim style. If you want the whole thing, if you are like, Hey, I love this. I'm going to be running it for, you know, a couple of years with my, with my players, you know, it seems really expensive for her and you almost $500 for a big pack. But if you are planning on running it for a couple of years, a few hours a week, it's actually a pretty good deal.
When you think about the entertainment value, you get out of it. But of course, there are much cheaper ways to get involved in as well. Checking out the PDFs, of course, checking out the free PDFs, picking up just the core book. There's all different kinds of ways that you can dig in and decide what you want to get. Here's the $1 a la carte example, but then basic tiers. Do you want just the PDF?
Do you want the starter set PDF? You know, what are all the different things you want? You know, digital quartermaster, you know, all sorts of digital sets. So lots of different packages that you can get. So my recommendation, I think it's excellent. I really, I really like it. I enjoyed playing it.
And what I would suggest is go in here, go to the Kickstarter page, download the three previews, take a look at it, talk about what with your players. You know, if you're like me and you just like collecting RPGs, maybe you got the PDF so you can stick on your hard drive and read them and get inspired from them from whatever RPGs that you're running or just kind of digging them.
And if you actually plan on playing it, then maybe you want some physical copies. Maybe you want a physical copy or maybe you want some other stuff that you can run for your group. Yes, Pixel 2 also reminds me that they have a lot of support for various virtual tabletops as well. You can get, let's see, I think they describe which virtual tabletops they support. But it's lots of them.
So for virtual tabletop support, they support Roll20, they support Alchemy, and they support Foundry. So you can get versions of this game on any of those platforms if you happen to be playing online, if you're one of the many people that are playing online. So great big Kickstarter. Lots going on. So far, very successful. The average pledge on this is like $130.
3,800 backers are supporting it with 26 days to go on the Kickstarter. Looks really, really cool. Again, thanks to the folks at Free League for sending me a copy of this, or not a copy of this, but a copy of the original Morkborg set to look at. Again, really, really beautiful. And I like it a lot. So you can find a link to this Kickstarter down in the show notes below.
Now is the season we're coming up to Halloween and on Monday's Sly Flourish article is going to be about running I6 Ravenloft, the original I6 Ravenloft adventure with Shadow Dark. And I have actually done a video on this before that was, I think, shot the day after I had run it. And I found that Shadow Dark is an absolutely fantastic way to run I6 Ravenloft.
I6 Ravenloft is the original Castle Ravenloft adventure written by Tracy and Laura Hickman for AD&D. So it's like 45 years old or something like that. It is my favorite adventure of all time. I am a huge fan of I6 Ravenloft. And it actually just works hand in hand with shadow dark. Shadow dark is a excellent system to run.
Uh, so because we have not yet hit Halloween, I wanted to mention it now in case you're thinking about how to do this, you in the, in the show notes, you can find a link to the video. Cause I'm, you know, the video is done before about a year ago now, 10 months ago it was done, but it was after Halloween. So I wanted to highlight the video again in the show notes.
And if you are watching this on YouTube, uh, I have already published an article on Sly Flourish. It's available on the Sly Flourish newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter and have it sent to you directly as an email. Link for that is also in the show notes. And you can get all of my tips and tricks for running I6 Ravenloft using Shadow Dark in a single session for a Halloween RPG game.
It's a really, really fun experience. I loved doing it. I highly recommend it. And again, you can find that down in the show notes. So I'm linking to both the video and I will link to the article in the show notes so that you can check it out. Please check it out.
We had mentioned that D&D Beyond now has the 2024 Player's Handbook available, and they had put it up with all the pre-orders, but now we have crossed the point where all of the pre-orders are fulfilled, and now anybody can get access to the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook on D&D Beyond. What I think is also really interesting
is that you can get access to the full dnd 2024 free rules on dnd beyond no account required no login required all of the material is available and it now includes before the in the previous two three weeks it only had four core classes the fighter the rogue the cleric and the wizard now it has all 12 classes available So you don't have to be logged in at all.
You can just go straight to the page. You get all of the rules for the game, all the information about creating characters, trinket lists, and all the character classes are available with one subclass each. So unlike the four subclasses that you get, you get one subclass for each backgrounds. There are only four backgrounds available and species. There are four of the core four species available.
So obviously there is a reason to pick up the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook if you want the extended backgrounds and extended species, also extended feats and everything else. But it's actually a lot of material that is available for free on the internet. You can just go hit it.
Again, not only is it like free, like, oh yeah, it's free, but you have to sign up for an account and, you know, join our newsletter and all this stuff. No, it's directly on the open internet with no login required in order to be able to grab all of this information. So I think that's really great. The rules glossary is also available with no, no login needed.
No, nothing there, which means that it's very easy to kind of send this to your players and say, Hey, You know, we're going to be playing a D&D 2024 game or whatever. You don't necessarily need to own anything. Obviously, you can still share everything like that. But you can send the link to this to them and they can read up on all of the rules. Really, it's a fully playable game.
I mean, so we don't have the Monster Manual yet. We don't have any of the Dungeon Master's Guide stuff yet. But from the player standpoint, from the player character standpoint... It's a fully playable game for free with nothing, nothing else required, right? No other material required. And I think that's pretty impressive.
And with all of the new updates and all the new rules that they've been working on for years. So that is now available on D&D Beyond. I'll link to it down in the show notes, but of course you can probably find it anyway. That's the D&D 2024 free rules. This is the player handbook rules. They are going to expand this out and include, I believe, monsters and magic items and other things.
Not all of it, obviously, but a lot of it so that you can get access to this and you can actually play the game, send it to your players and things like that. So I think that that is really outstanding. This past week, Wizards of the Coast also announced what they are going to be doing with D&D Adventurers League. And this is sort of the first rubber meets the road official guidance
on what D&D 2024 compatibility means and looks like, because this is what they're doing for their program, right? The organized play, the Adventurers League organized play program, this is their organized play program, and they are talking directly about what compatibility means when it comes to D&D 2024. And so now like we talked about compatibility all the time.
We thought about compatibility and like, how is it going to work and everything like that? Well, now we know what they're going to do. For me, while D&D 2024 was coming out, while the Player's Handbook was on the way, I had really two outstanding questions that I wanted to ask. One question was how the hell are they going to handle this in D&D Beyond? And we kind of have an answer to that.
Mostly we have an answer to that. And two was how is organized play going to work? How is the Adventurers League going to work with this? Those were two questions because I didn't have a good answer. I didn't really know what they were going to do. Well, they did it. And they kind of show, okay, A, they managed to handle D&D 2024 stuff in D&D Beyond. There's still lots of bugs.
There's still lots of problems with filtering information and figuring out the legacy stuff from the new stuff. Lots of things like that are going on. And I'm sure the developers are kind of working on ways to figure that out. But, you know, it's not super smooth, but they have a way. And you can build a D&D 2024 character with the character builder inside D&D Beyond. So we have that.
There was that whole thing about the spells, but we're not going to worry about that. That was up and down within a week or so. So what I what I really found kind of funny and I'm going to pick on one thing. I got to pick on one thing. And it's this one line that really cracks me up. Right.
It has always been the Adventurers League policy to use the most recent version of the rules when they have been updated. Right. They kind of say this and you're like, it's sort of like we have always been at war with East Asia. We are at war with East Asia. We've always been at war with East Asia. Right. There's never been a situation like this, certainly within 5e.
And I don't think there's ever been a situation like this in the Adventurers League. The furthest back we can go is when there was a version change from 3.0 to 3.5, and there were new core books for 3.0 to 3.5. Maybe you could say the D&D Essentials stuff...
was another period of time, but when, when with fourth edition, except in the D and D essentials, fourth edition side, they didn't say, Hey, the essentials fighters are now the only fighters you can play. You can't play the fighters from the fourth edition players handbook. They let you play all of it together. So even in that circumstance, this isn't true, right?
But it feels like if you have to tell me that it's always been this way, It probably hasn't always been this way or you wouldn't have to tell me, right? If you have to explain yourself of saying, this is always the way the rules have been. Well, if we don't know that, whose fault is that, right?
And also it's not the way things have always been because there's never been a situation like this before. We're in a totally different situation, right? Saying, oh, it's a rules update. It's like, it's not a rules update. You're selling me new books. You charged me $50 for a new book. If it was an update, that's an errata. This isn't an errata, this is a full new book.
Some are gonna still argue that it's an entirely new version of D&D. Others are gonna give it funky names like 5.2 or 5.5 or whatever. No one can even agree what to call it, much less exactly what it is. But OK, that aside, the idea of like, hey, it's always you know, this is like the naked gun scene where he's standing in front. There's nothing to see here. That's right.
There's buildings exploding behind him. So, right. There's there's that idea that I think you could not have said that. Right. Oh, it's always been this way. No, it hasn't.
it hasn't been this way it wasn't like this with dnd essentials of fourth edition the last time anything like this happened was dnd 30 to 3.5 is the most similar circumstance to what we have today and that was 20 years ago more than 20 years ago so what does it mean first of all they're saying hey for adventurers league you're going to need to update your character and you're going to update your character to the newest rules which are the rules that are available in dnd 2024
So the expectation is that 60 days, you have 60 days, right? Which doesn't seem like a lot of time because not even all the core books are out within 60. The Dungeon Master's got to be out in 60 days, but the Monster Manual will be out in 60 days.
So, you know, you're going to want to update, you're going to, in order to be Adventurer's League legal, you're going to need to update your character to the new Adventurer's League rules. Now, the reason for this is that GMs are going to be using D&D 2024 rules when they're running games. And there isn't a good way to run 2014 core classes with their core subclasses inside the D&D 2024 rule set.
So from that standpoint of compatibility, the idea is if the DM is running 2024 rules, you need to be running D&D 2024 characters, right? Now, here's where compatibility kind of comes in, though. A, subclasses.
If the subclass doesn't exist in the D&D 2024 updated rules, you use the old version of the subclass, and you get the abilities for that subclass at the same point you would get subclass abilities for your D&D 2024 updates.
character so that means old subclasses are as far as they're concerned compatible compatible enough to run in adventurers league which makes sense right that makes sense that that works out same thing is kind of true with origins and species if you want to be using origins and species there are ways for you to use origins and species and you can get stuff like that now they say oh by the way well your magic items for the time being you're going to use your dnd 2014 magic items
Eventually, when the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide comes out, your magic item is going to magically shift over to whatever the new rules are for that magic items. If you choose a background and species from an older book, you can reference the background and species from older books in Chapter 2 of the Player's Handbook.
yada yada yada running the published adventures this is also kind of funny they say like good news is that when the new monsters are out you can use monsters from the monster manual because we only reference them in the adventures but that's actually not true the adventures almost always include all of the stat blocks for the old monsters in the back of the adventure which will now be out of date when the new 2024 monster manual comes out they're going to have different you know different stats for those monsters again not hard it just means you have to have your monster manual there and you look up monsters either online on dnd beyond or in your monster manual if you have the physical version
And then they say like, hey, by the way, we know people are going to screw this up. Don't be a dick, right? That if somebody comes to your table, the 2014 character, you know, roll with it and you'll figure it out and then tell them, hey, you're going to need to switch over to a new character because you're going to have weird things like you could have two wizards.
One's a 2014 wizard and one's a 2024 wizard, each of them with counterspell and counterspell operates differently from one another because the 2014 wizard counterspell operates differently from the 2024 wizard counterspell. So there's going to be odd bits like that that, you know, people are going to have to figure out. So this seems about as reasonable as one can expect.
I think there are two other sort of modes of play that they are not including, and I can understand why they're not including them. One would be, you can only use the 2024 rules, that we're doing a full reset. You want to play in Adventurers League, you want to play in our new Adventurers League set, you play with the new D&D 2024 rules, and that's it, right?
You don't get to use anything from previous. You don't get to use subclasses. You don't get to use old species. You get to use the stuff that's in this one book. That way, we're all on the same even keel. All the balance is there. There's no odd bits. But of course, you can't bring any of your old characters. So they could do that for a new campaign.
out and i've talked to a lot of gms and a lot of organizers who say i kind of would have preferred that because it's simple it's straightforward it gives an opportunity for everybody to kind of start over again you know there's a lot of you know a lot of value in having that just use 2024 i'm not saying they should do that instead of this and they're not going to they've already done this it's already done six days ago it happened so i'm not changing time i'm not changing history but it would have been interesting if they said hey for this campaign over here
Also Adventures League, but this one is just 2024. And then another one would be classic D&D.
classic right and classic dnd would be we're going to have another campaign that's just using the 2014 rules up until 2024 but nothing from 2024 and above so you do not use the new players handbook use the old players handbook all the old material the xanathar's tasha's all the other stuff that came out and that's sort of our classic 5e campaign so that everybody who liked the old way and isn't really interested in dnd 2024 could still play with their campaign so
So those would be two other modes of play. Now, one thing that I think is interesting, you go like, nobody would ever want to do that. That's a terrible idea. Well, the new head of Wizards of the Coast is a former Blizzard executive. And Blizzard actually did this with World of Warcraft.
That World of Warcraft had a sort of an, I don't know if it was illegal, but it was like an unauthorized classic World of Warcraft servers that people could run so that you could play World of Warcraft online. As though it had just come out. And so you didn't have, you know, 28 expansions and all the new character options and all the new stuff that they had.
You got to play World of Warcraft the way you had played it back when you first started back in the early 2000s. And that got popular enough that Blizzard themselves came out with classic World of Warcraft servers. So there are servers that you can join on Blizzard to do that.
Well, interestingly enough, the executive that worked over at Blizzard while that was going on is now the executive over at Wizards of the Coast. So it doesn't seem that outlandish to say if there was enough interest in people saying, hey, we just want to play classic 5e, not D&D 2024 5e, that they could say, okay, we're going to have a campaign that's built around that old stuff.
Of course, GMs can do whatever they want. Even organizers can do whatever they want and say, hey, we're going to just run the old 5E adventures that came out for Adventurers League with the old stuff. We're not going to include any D&D 2024 stuff, and we're going to play like we've been playing for the last 10 years. You could have a group of people that say that.
You could also have a group of people say, we're going to start with D&D 2024 rules, and that's all we're going to use. We're not going to use anything in the middle. And then you have this, which is sort of split between them. You can use your classic stuff when it doesn't exist in D&D 2024. If it exists in D&D 2024, you use the D&D 2024 rules.
so i don't think that this is unreasonable i think the approach that they took is not unreasonable i also think like the idea of coming out with three modes of play is just going to split your player base up and that's going to be even more complicated so obviously they needed to pick one and stick to that one i know that there were people who would have been more interested in them saying we're going to do gnd 2024 and that's it but obviously that's going to piss off a lot of people especially like what if you have character i've got a whole bunch of adventures league characters are they all dead right i cannot play them anymore when could i ever play those characters it
So I think that going with 2024 only is not great. And instead, we can convert over to 2024. Now, of course, people are like, well, now you're forcing me to buy books. Not necessarily. Again, we talked about the D&D 2024 free rules. There's a lot of stuff that you can do in there, especially if you're using subclasses that don't exist in D&D 2024. You don't have to convert over.
Now, when I think about like two of my characters, I have like a 10th level fighter and I think a 10th level cleric. I keep mine a tier two because I don't like tier three. And they are both using subclasses that are only available that are available in the D&D 2024 player's handbook and are not in the free rules.
So in theory, if I didn't already have it, I would have to buy the D&D 2024 player's handbook on D&D Beyond in order to play. But also the price is pretty reasonable, right? Like we're not talking, it's $50 for the physical book. It's $30 to buy it on D&D Beyond. And you're getting hours and hours and hours and hours of entertainment out of it. So I don't think it's that unreasonable.
I can understand people saying like, hey, you're forcing me to upgrade. You're forcing me to get these new books. I'm angry about that. Okay, you can convert your character and switch over to the free rule so you don't have to pay anything at all.
But if you want to convert your characters to the stuff that's there, you could also pick subclasses that exist in older systems that you already have as well. So I can understand where it's coming from. I can understand people being mad about it, that people are allowed to feel how they feel.
And I can recognize that there's definitely like a, hey, you need to upgrade if you want to stay, keep playing with Adventurers League. I don't think anybody in Adventurers League is that surprised. And I'd also be surprised if people in Adventurers League weren't at least curious and interested enough to pick up the new core rules.
If they really don't like them, they're probably not in Adventurers League and they can play their home games using whatever systems they want. Interesting stuff and interesting times. And I think the first time we're going to see this really play out is at Gamehole Con, which has a bunch of official Adventurers League stuff. I think they're right within that 60-day grace period.
So it'll be interesting to see what DMs are running there, what kind of characters people are running there. Is there expectation that all the DMs will be running with 2024 rules?
and will there be an expectation that people are going to be playing with 2024 characters i'll probably upgrade i think we're i don't know if i'm playing in a lot of adventures league games when i'll be there but i'll probably upgrade my characters anyway interesting stuff and for people that aren't interested in adventures league but you want to see what compatibility looks like it's worth reading this to get an idea of what they believe compatibility looks like when the rubber meets the road when it comes to actual implementation you can see what it means in here interesting stuff
So the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook is now available. It's available to everybody. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it at your local game shops. I now, I think I own four copies in my house. Yes, we own four copies, two of which we purchased, two of which were given as review copies from Wizards of the Coast. So we've got a lot of copies of the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook.
Plus I have access on D&D Beyond because I wrote for them long ago. So I have what they call a D&D Insider account, which got access. So we have lots of access to it, but it's available in lots of places. What's really cool, and if you remember, we talked about Mike's Little Candles.
Mike's Little Candles are little candles that are lit that tell us how well is WotC supporting the overall RPG hobby, right? This is a way to look at what Wizards of the Coast is doing with Dungeons & Dragons. Are they being good stewards of D&D? And without regards to whatever matters to them and their business. I don't care about their business. I care about the game, and I care about the hobby.
So I'm very curious about what they're doing and what candles are lit. And I have to say, this past week, A lot of candles were lit. The D&D free rules are a good example of that because I'm pretty sure that that gives us a good idea of what's going to be available in the D&D 5.2 system reference document.
By the way, one thing I forgot to mention in the D&D Adventurers League update is that it specifically talks about... When it says updating existing Adventures League adventures, it talks about the Dungeon Craft program.
And in it says, if you published an adventure under this program, those adventures should not be updated until after the release of the updated fifth edition system reference document, SRD 5.2. And links to the discussion about how they are going to be releasing the D&D core rule books, expanding the SRD back on May 6th.
Every time Wizards of the Coast mentions that they are, you know, that things are going to have to wait for the 5.2 SRD, I get a little happy surge, right? That makes me excited because that means they're still talking about it. They're still interested in it. They still plan on doing it.
And more and more, they are relying on it being released in order to update other things or let other people update other things, which means they're counting on it coming out too.
So I'm very happy about that because that is when the 5.2 SRD is available under a Creative Commons license, that is another big bright candle that says not only is the fifth edition rule set available to all of us to use for our games, either to play or to run or to build tools or to build products because the 5.1 SRD was in the Creative Commons license.
But now all of their new rules updates, which they've done, which they spent a lot of time on a lot of play testing on all of those are going to be available for us to use forever in the future. So that's excellent, too. So every time they talk about that, that's going to be a big candlelit. And I'm very glad to see them keep talking about it because you always worry.
I don't want to talk about it because I feel like I'm going to jinx it. That people in position change. One of the things that I know has been going on at Wizards of the Coast is there's corporate infighting. There's groups that want to do one thing and a group that wants to do another thing. And every so often, these groups align in a way that's really bad for the hobby.
And then other ways they align differently. I'm banging my microphone. Other ways they line up and really good things happen for the hobby. And you never know which it's going to be, who's going to have the political power at any given time inside the corporation to make either really good things happen or really bad things happen.
Right now, it feels like a lot of really good things are happening. And not only are they still talking about the 5.2 SRD and that things are going on really well in that. but they did release the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook on multiple platforms, including Foundry. You can pick it up on Foundry, 30 bucks.
Gets you the D&D full Player's Handbook, not a SRD, not a limited set, but a full 2024 Player's Handbook available on Foundry. You can get it on Fantasy Grounds.
full 2024 players handbook available on fantasy grounds you can get it on roll 20 you can get the 2024 players handbook on roll 20 not only that but the free rules are also available on roll 20 i don't know if the free rules are available on the other platforms but i've seen the free rules available here Not only that, but Roll20 has a new Roll20 characters guide.
I will link to this in the show notes because it's a little hard to find. It's called app.roll20.net slash characters, where you can make characters using the D&D 2024 rules in a mobile-friendly character builder. Is it perfect? No. Does it still have bugs that you got to figure out? Yes, it does.
But you can walk through and you can build a, you know, step by step, build a character with D&D 2024 rules. Right now, I'm not even, I think I'm signed in, but I don't own it. So you can see that we're getting...
material available in the in the free rules again free rules here right you get the four four subclasses or four backgrounds that are available and things like that so it's still got bugs but the neat thing is it is building a mobile friendly character builder that's not inside of roll 20 now it's buggy so is the dnd beyond character builders got bugs too all of these things are brand new and i'm seeing a lot of people that are upset about it going oh my god it's so buggy and it's useless and i hate it
it's been like a week right the book has been out like a week give it a give it a little like you know me i'm i'm all about like what matters to us but holy cow there's lots of people working on this and the fact is that we're going to see all this stuff get better the bugs are going to get worked out and we're going to have lots of online digital tools and that to me is the most important thing we have lots of options for our online tools you are not stuck with just using dnd beyond only wizards of the coast didn't say we're only going to put dnd 2024 on dnd beyond you know they could have it would have been really easy for them to say of course why we don't want why would we
support other people's platforms. We have a platform. We paid $160 million for it. And that's the one we're going to be on. That's a very reasonable corporate thing to say, but it's not good for the hobby. What's good for the hobby is saying, no, we're going to put this material everywhere. Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, Roll20. We're going to make it available.
And we're going to put out a 5.2 SRD so that people can use it on other platforms too. And there's still options to get it to like import characters into things like alchemy. Alchemy recently put out a video where they talked about how to get D&D stuff into alchemy with an importer. Shard has a character importer. I don't know if that's going to work with the D&D 2024 stuff. We'll have to see.
Lots of different options. Two options in particular I think are worth noting. The Foundry version of it and the Fantasy Grounds version of it, once you buy them and download them to your version of Foundry or Fantasy Grounds, it's yours. They can't pull it back. They can't change the license on you later and then delete it. Once you've downloaded it to your setup and you've backed it up,
Your version of Foundry with those versions of the rules are yours to keep. So that is a really powerful feature, right? That's something about Fantasy Grounds and Foundry that Roll20 and Alchemy and Shard and D&D Beyond don't have, which is any way for you to be able to actually download and own your material. So if that's important to you, certain people, it's not important to you.
And honestly, I don't even know how important that really is. I don't know that like...
30 years from now you're going to actually pull up your old version of foundry so that you can run it and that there's no other way to get the character stuff available but i do think about the fact that there's very few fourth edition character builders that are out there and they're all sort of like pseudo legal because there never was a license for it dnd wizards of the coast is the only one that had a character builder for it so lots of interesting things there that we that we have to consider and and that's one reason why like having the material available it's
is really useful. But of course, with things like the system reference document being available, it means there's always an opportunity for people to build digital tools around this rule set when they feel the need. And it looks like a lot of material is going to be included in that rule set. So that's pretty good. But that's really good, right?
It means we have lots of different options, lots of different ways to play D&D online, including four different platforms that you can play on, plus other platforms where you can import the data. And of course, we have the physical book. They can't take the physical book away from us. They can't update it and change it and pull it away later.
We also have the 2014 book, and it's not like that one's going away either. So if you like 2014 better, you still have that book. You can still play it that way. So I think that those are all really good things.
one quick thing i wanted to talk about when i've been looking over dnd 2024 stuff and kind of like you know i haven't done like a deep review yet because i want to run it i want to run it i want to play it i want to i want to do stuff with it but one of the things that caught my eye where i was like oh i don't think i'm crazy about that was the the way that tools are handled so we're going to go into the 2024 players you know i'm going to go to the free rules because i probably get in less trouble if they decided like they didn't like what i was doing here so we're going to go to the free rules because everybody has access to those
If you look under tools, this caught people's eyes. I heard about it on forums. I heard about it on the Discord server. And basically you have these different tools, like artisans tools, alchemical supplies, brewer surprise, calligraphy supplies, all these sort of things. And all of them have a DC. So like seal or pry open a door or container is a DC 20.
right cartographer schools draft a map of a small area DC 15 and some of them got people's attention in one way or another like if you look at thieves tools thieves tools say pick a lock DC 15 or disarm a trap DC 15 which makes it sound like All the locks in the world and all of the traps in the world always have a DC of 15. You never have a DC of a lock that's a 10.
Or whether it's a small cobbler's house where he keeps a few of his copper coins in a lockbox under his shelf, or it's Orcus's vault where he keeps the wand of Orcus when he's off on holiday down there in Thanatos. It's always a DC 15, a rogue who can go and pick the lock and it's a DC 15. And a lot of us were like, it doesn't even say default anywhere.
And like, if you go to the tool section, you know, it says, if you have proficiency in the tools, you know, you do them. And he says, this talks about it and it says, utilize this entry. I hate the word utilize. This entry lists the things you can do with the tool. When you take the utilize action, you can do one of these things.
Each time you take the action, this entry also provides the DC for the action. Like that's it. That's the DC. You want to pick a lock. That's what you pick a lock for. And then some of them, you look like disguise kit and it's like apply makeup DC 10. And you're like, really? I don't know. I have a disguise kit. I'm proficient in it, but I have to roll a check and a DC 10 to see if I apply makeup.
You know, do I look like Bozo the Clown if I screw this up? Like, what does that go? So that was bothering us, bothering me a little bit, bothering some other people because we're like, man, I don't, why am I here? If I'm the DM, why do I exist? Right? I thought I'm the one that comes up with DCs.
Wouldn't it be better to teach people how to fish and say, hey, GMs, you come up with the DCs for things. You get to decide what they are based on the difficulty of the situation that's going on. And then the characters can use their skills and do roles in order to see whether they meet that difficulty. And then I thought about another way.
And it's like, well, the old versions of D&D would have things like when you think about the first time skills were really in D&D, it was sort of like rogues, thieves back then, I think, when they had like their pick locks or the fighters with strength scores had like a break, bend bars and lift gates check. And they were percentage rolls. And you would roll a percentage check to see if you did it.
And you knew what the chance was because it was right there on the sheet. Other RPGs have this. Call of Cthulhu, for example, has a system where you have skills where you do a D100 roll under. You know what you need to make because it's right there on your character sheet. The DM doesn't change it.
They say make a check and you know what to roll and you know what you have to beat without having to ask anybody anything.
dragon bane is another example role-playing game where it has ability scores and it does not have ability bonuses instead you roll a d20 and your job is to roll under your ability score so however high your ability score is that you're more likely to be able to make the check if you have a 10 you have to roll 10 or under if you're 15 you have to roll 15 or under
And that meant you knew what the DC was without having to ask the GM, without having to do anything else. And in a case like Dragonbane, you would use boons and banes to make things more or less difficult. I'm going to give you a boon, which means you get to roll a die and subtract that from the number, I think, or something like that. Shadow the Weird Wizard does the same thing.
All the DCs are assumed to be DC 10, but GMs can make things easier or harder by adding banes, which is kind of like adding advantage and disadvantage. So in theory, you could roll these DCs and you could decide as a GM, well, I'm going to apply advantage or disadvantage based on the situation. The Lock of Orcus is really hard, so you're going to have to roll with disadvantage.
Even though it's a DC 15, you're now at disadvantage. However, I discovered something else when I was looking through the book itself. And it turns out in the front of the book, when you look at DC D20 tests, I was like, well, doesn't it have the ladder in there? And it says difficulty class. Difficulty class of an ability check represents the task difficulty.
The more difficult the task, the higher to the DC. The rules for providing certain checks, the rules provide DCs for certain checks, but the DM ultimately sets them. Six words. The DM ultimately sets them. I guess that's five words, right? Which is saying, hey, all of the other stuff in this book that has set DCs, the DM can always change them, right? And it's here.
Some people said like, it'd be nice if they would say that in the tool section so that I don't have to go find it in the beginning of the book. But the reality is like, Look, it's in the rules. It says it, right? And it's in the rules section. It still has the same ladder of very easy, easy, medium, hard, very hard, and so on.
So it still has those difficulty classes there that gives the GM the ladder. It's even showing the ladder to the players, given that this isn't a GM book. It's giving the ladder to the players to say, hey, by the way, your DM is probably going to pick things between five and 30, and they are the ultimate arbiter of what the DC is. So we have that too.
So really what we have is what I think is actually a pretty good system. I like that it has defaults. I think it's important that as a GM, as a DM, you're probably going to want to tell your players, hey, just to remind you, the DCs are not always going to be the DCs in that book. Many cases, it's going to be free. Like starting a fire with an alchemical set is not going to require a check.
So we really get the best of both worlds. We GMs can change difficulty classes. But on the other hand, we can just say it's the default. And there's a bunch of default DCs that are already in the book. They can look them up. They already know them.
And that gives us that little advantage that like Dragonbane and Call of Cthulhu and other systems have of the player already knows the check before they even have to make the check. It's sitting right there in front of them. We don't have to do anything. We say pick the lock. Oh, what do I do? It's right there. It's the default.
Now, probably we're going to always have to, you know, we're probably going to have to tell them it's the default. But, you know. I think that that is okay. I think I'm okay with that. A, I'm happy with the six words in here that say, but the DM ultimately decides them. That's great. That means we know that the DM can change those DCs based on circumstances.
In many cases, either lowering them or removing them completely for stupid stuff where it doesn't really matter. And in some cases, making them harder, like when you're trying to pick the door to Orcus's vault where he keeps the wand of Orcus and Thanatos when he's on vacation. So, I mean, that would probably be a DC 30. But a really good rogue, 20th level rogue, could probably hit a 30.
It's not out of hand. So I thought that was interesting. There was just one basic thing looking at D&D 2024 and the rules that it's got and the way that it handles the game that I thought was pretty interesting. On one side, there are default DCs that both GMs and players can rely on to assume whenever you're picking a lock, it's a DC 15.
And also recognizing that the GM can change those based on the circumstances that are going on in the game. I thought that was very interesting.
I want to offer you two words, two simple words that can help you increase the challenge of combat encounters in your 5e games, but probably in all of your games, especially D20 based games, whether you're playing games like Pathfinder 2, or you're playing games like Dragonbane, or you're playing games like fifth edition D&D,
If it's a D20 game that sort of operates similar to the way that D20 games operate, you know, again, 13th Age and other systems like this, this is pretty much a universal two-word solution on how to increase the challenge of combat in your role-playing games. Are you ready? It's very straightforward. The answer is more monsters. More monsters is the way to increase the challenge.
Now, I know that seems obvious, but let's dive into this a little bit. Let's talk about this idea about more monsters and why it matters. Those of you who are familiar with my nonsense might be familiar with the things I call the dials of monster difficulty. We wrote about this in our book, Fantastic Forge of Foes. I've written about it before on other websites.
On Sly Flourish, I've written about it before and talked about it. The idea of the four dials is that there's four basic ways that you can manipulate a battle. for difficulty both going down and going up. You can also manipulate them to increase or decrease the speed of a battle.
Those dials include how many hit points does the monster have, how much damage does a monster's attack do, how many attacks does that monster get, and how many monsters are there in the battle. And all of these are little dials that you can turn that can affect the battle. They can affect pacing. They can affect threat. They can affect danger.
They can affect all different things as you twist these dials. But probably the most effect out of all of those for increasing or decreasing the challenge of combat is the number of monsters in that combat. That's different than the size of the monsters in that combat. I think the number of monsters matters more than the size of those monsters, assuming relative comparison.
Obviously, if you have 15th level characters, adding a couple more skeletons to a group of skeletons is not going to have a big effect. But assuming that the monsters are roughly at the general challenge rating of the characters, adding more monsters is going to have a dramatic effect on the difficulty of the battle.
Likewise, removing monsters will have a dramatic effect on the difficulty of battle going down. So why? Why does this one effect matter so much? And there's a bunch of different reasons why this matters. And then we're going to talk about right now. One of them is it spreads out character attacks.
When there's more monsters around on a battle, sometimes a really tactically focused group of characters and group of players are going to know what they call focus firing. Focus firing is we're all going to focus on one of these at a time and kill them outright so that we're not constantly facing five monsters at the very end, but five, four, three, two, and one.
That means you're going to take less damage. This is a trick for players too. You're going to take less damage because you're going to be removing more monsters from play faster when you all focus your fire on them. However, sometimes you can't do that because of positioning or because of layout or because of the perceived threat or your players are not super tactically focused.
They're spreading damage around. Yes, I would love to attack that one guy over there, but there's three guys over here and I can do burning hands and hit all three of them. So that's actually more damage. So I'm going to do that.
So there's reasons why they can't necessarily focus fire on them, which means that characters attacks and the damage that they're doing is spread out across more monsters than it would be if you have like fewer monsters or even one monster.
the other one is it complicates movement and tactics because there's multiple monsters out there it means the characters are going to have to move around in order to get engaged with certain ones they got brutes up front they got to get away from you have opportunity attacks so if you try to move away to attack someone else you're going to take damage having all of those monsters sitting out on a battlefield is going to make the whole physical environment more complicated to operate in more so than surrounding one monster and beating the hell out of it
So more monsters means that movement and opportunity attacks and other sort of tactical things are going to have a bigger effect because now there's more monsters you have to deal with. A big one is the increase in the action economy. Every monster you add increases the number of total actions that those monsters get.
When you have more monsters than characters, that means the monsters are acting more often than the players are. They're getting to do more stuff. Now, maybe those are just the number of attacks that they're doing, but maybe it's things like spellcasting or maybe it's operating things that are in the environment. They can just do more stuff.
And again, when you have a single monster that you just keep making bigger and bigger and bigger, oftentimes that monster's action economy doesn't really go up. Now, you can think, yeah, well, legendary actions do, except the trick about legendary actions is it's not really increasing the action economy.
Yeah, they get more actions, but they do less damage because the amount of damage that they do is spread across more actions. So, yeah, it means they're not going to get totally pinned down by not being able to make or missing their one attack. But they're still doing about the same amount of damage they would do if they had fewer attacks.
So even solo monsters and legendary monsters really aren't dramatically increasing the action economy, even though they kind of get more actions because their effectiveness is spread across those actions. Where if you're adding monsters, they get all of the effects that they would have as a new monster. And that adds into the total effect.
That's why adding more monsters makes the whole battle more dangerous. But having monsters that are able to do more moves, more bonus actions, more actions, more stuff inside of a battle is a much bigger effect than making them bigger or giving them more hit points or making their attacks do more damage.
it doesn't require customization now i'm big into monster customization i love reskinning i of course my friends scott gray and teos abadi and i wrote forge of foes with a whole idea about rapidly building monsters very quickly and customizing those monsters to really add fun thematic events to your game on the fly but the reality is sometimes you just have the monster manual in front of you you have whatever your monster book is and you don't really want to spend a lot of time or a lot of headspace in you know going through and improvising all of those new monster abilities
You just want to use those monsters. Well, guess what? If you want to increase the threat without customizing a monster, add more monsters. It's very straightforward. You just add more monsters into it and it goes up. There's one big problem with this whole idea. When you add more monsters, the whole battle slows down. This is the one problem with more monsters for increasing a threat.
When you add more monsters, the battle slows down. And sometimes, especially at higher levels, or if you have lots of players, lots of characters on the table, battles can already take a long time. And if you throw more monsters in there, the battle's gonna take even longer. Maybe this is okay. If it's a great big climactic battle, everyone's having a good time.
You're still managing to move the spotlight around. You're still making sure everybody's got fun things they could do. And they're generally engaged with a game and they're having a good time. Then it's okay. If a battle takes 90 minutes instead of 45 minutes or whatever. It's okay. I've run great big boss battles that took three hours.
It was the whole session was one big battle, but it was still fun because it was their big climactic battle. It was the big thing that they did. If you're familiar with Baldur's Gate 3, if you managed to get to the end of Baldur's Gate 3, I'm not going to spoil, but there's a great big battle at the end of Baldur's Gate 3 that has tons of bad guys in it. Tons of them.
Not only are there tons of bad guys, there's tons of different bosses in that fight. There's lots of different things that you want to target because you're like, oh, I hate that guy. Oh, I also hate that guy. Oh, that guy looks really dangerous, too. I should probably take care of him, which spreads around the damage that makes things really, really hard.
That battle takes hours to run because it's so big and has so many moving parts. It takes a long time. So our trick for this is to work one of the other dials. Now I'm focusing this dial on the idea of adding more monsters, right? Add or subtract more monsters from the game.
But there's another dial that directly works with this that can help you speed up the battle and move things forward and change the pacing. And that's the number of hit points that monsters have. If you look at fifth edition monsters, their hit points are not static. They have a dice equation next to it.
You are free within the rules of the game to increase or decrease the amount of hit points that the monster has within the range of those dice. I'll give you another little trick. You can ignore that completely and just increase or decrease hit points however you want anyway. Double their hit points, have their hit points, drop them right to one hit point.
I give you, you are given full permission to modify the hit points of your monsters however you want, whenever you want, as long as it's there to make the game more fun. As long as you're doing it in order to make your players have a good time.
that's the key you're not doing it for revenge you're not doing it because you're mad you're not doing it because you're bored you're doing it because you want your players to have a good time if that good time means increasing the threat so things seem more dangerous go ahead and tweak that dial up if it means hey the battle's taken a whole long time the characters have already done a really good job they got over the excitement they've managed to turn the tide maybe you start lowering the hit points so the battle will end sooner you are totally given permission to do that it can totally work and it works just fine
So that dial works directly in proportion to the number of monsters dial. If you have lots of monsters that are on the table, but the battle has gotten past the point where it's fun, lower all the hit points of those monsters so the characters can go around and kill them and knock them out with one hit.
You can even just ignore hit points and say the next attack on that's going to kill that monster. I've done this many times. The next person who hits this target with any damage at all is going to kill it. and they do, and it makes the battle, oh, thank God we got rid of it. Oh, we got rid of another. Wow, we're cleaning up. This is great. We clean up. They feel really good.
They get a whole bunch of cool final blows on all of their monsters, and then the battle is over. So when you find that increasing the number of monsters makes the battles more threatening, more challenging, and tougher, but the length of time is going up, use that hit point dial. Lower the hit point dial when you need to. You can do it during the battle itself. So
your initial guys can be really hard and the later guys can be really easy. Why? Because you turn that dial because you're improving the pacing of the game. The pacing of the game is really, really critical to making that game fun. So two words, you want to increase or decrease the threat of a battle. The easiest way to do so is adding monsters or subtracting monsters.
Every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A. Anybody that is a patron of Sly Flourish can ask an RPG related question. Every Friday, I answer these questions. Some of those questions I bring here to the show so that we can dive into them a little deeper.
uh george pr says what do you plan on running after shadow dark and or do you plan on running a game using the void renters codex so i've only dived into it a little bit i do not currently have a plan to run a campaign in it it might surprise you that with the hundreds of rpg products that i surround myself with i'm usually only able to pick one or two that i'm going to run for an actual campaign that i'm going to run
I love them dearly. I get inspired by them. I love flipping through them. I love to share them with you guys to see if they resonate with you. But I'm actually only able to play a very small handful of products compared to the products that I pick up and I'm inspired from. So Voidrunner's Cortex is not currently on the list. What am I planning to run after Shadow Dark?
You can actually see a video where I started talking about my new campaign. The new campaign I'm going to be running for my Sunday group is going to be set in the Maharadi Empire, the Dragon Empire of the Midgard setting by Kobold Press. We're going to be using the Tales of the Valiant rule system with Kobold Press's Midgard setting to run a fun adventure about subterfuge and theft and rebellion in
within the tyrannical rule of the dragon and the dragon lords of the maharati empire so it looks to be really fun if you want to learn more about what that's going to be like you can check out the video i will link to it in the show notes and that you will probably see a whole slew of new videos of me prepping for that game as i run that game for my sunday group my wednesday group is in the middle of a city of arches level up advanced 5e game and i think we're probably going to go for a few more months with that before we're going to switch and then i'm running a third game
which is currently set in Descent into the Depths of the Earth, the classic 1970s Gary Gygax adventure that followed on from my Shadowed Keep in the Borderlands adventure. The characters are seventh level. That is a traditional 2014 5E D&D game. And that one's probably going to go on for a little bit more too.
So I don't really have any plans for what I'm going to run for either of those two campaigns. I usually like to let it go and see what comes out and see what kind of grabs me before we decide what we're going to switch to next for those campaigns. So that's where those currently stand for my own campaigns. Mark S says, you speak about upbeats and downbeats within a session.
How would you manage upbeats and downbeats in a larger campaign adventure? In my long running 5e game using a published adventure, I've been trying to foreshadow upcoming threats and events while giving players options for what challenges they would like to take on next.
Last session, they leveled up to level nine and were dropping lots of hints that they thought that their effort to rid the region of evil would have paid off by now, and they would not have so many large looming threats. I'm following the follow-up adventures that came with the digital code in the Dragon of Icespire Peak box set. My friends wrote those. Sean Merwin wrote one.
I think Will Doyle wrote one, and James Intercaster wrote one. So yeah, those are good friends of mine wrote those. But they thought their work with the Cult of Talos and fixing up the area around Phandalin and the High Road would have paid off and made the place more safe by now. My question is, should DMs take breaks between threats and dangers facing the characters every once in a while?
And if so, how often? Should there be upbeats of peace and tranquility among big looming threats as the players grow in power and renown? Yeah, I think so.
So I first I was like, beats are really a thing that you want to have on hand and prepare for as a way to change up the actual session that you're running, that you want to keep, you know, upward beats and downward beats are small tactical things where when things have been going really hard on the characters, you have a friendly NPC who can offer good advice.
If they're down in the depths of a dungeon and they're low on resources and they've been getting beaten up by specters, maybe a wall collapses and they find a holy fountain that gives them the equivalent of a short or long rest when they drink the water from the fountain. Or maybe they find a treasure parcel or maybe they figure out that other people have already triggered a bunch of traps.
What are the good things that can occur to offset all of the bad things that are going to occur? You don't want a perfect oscillation of good upward beats and downward beats, but you definitely want to have, if you have a bunch of downward beats, you want to have an upward beat.
And if you're in regions or campaigns where there's lots of downward beats, you want to think about what are some of the upward beats here? What are some of the things that I can add in? And make yourself a list. I do it. I'll make a list of 10 upward beats for these big downbeats that are occurring.
Or if things are going really easy on them, what are some of the major challenges that I can throw in there that'll make things a little harder? But generally, I think about those from the standpoint of dropping them into improvise during my game. But yes, you can absolutely do them during a campaign. And I think it's probably a pretty good idea that after they've beaten a major threat, it's okay.
Maybe it doesn't have to turn into a shopping episode. But maybe you have some scenes where the threats that they're facing are relatively low or they're cleaning up things.
So maybe they defeated the cult of Talos, but there's still a couple left over and they need to go hunt them down and take care of those last troublesome cults of Talos or they need to go, you know, hey, now that we've done this, we got to bring the treasure back to the people who got all their treasury stole from them and we might have some challenges on the way.
So you can still have some lower stakes adventures that the characters go on that aren't the great big huge threats, but instead some fun things that are going on.
So, yeah, an adventure that I think about like this is Tomb of Annihilation, where you want to have a dial on the overall the overarching threat of that campaign so that the characters are willing to do fun things and go on side quests rather than always worrying about the death curse and how it's ruining everybody's existence.
So turn those dials and maybe when your own campaign have a dial that you can turn. So like, hey, the threat of the cults, they're set back. Maybe they're still out there doing stuff. But right now you don't know what. And it seems like the threats are really down. And now instead you can go on a treasure hunt. Right.
You can go, hey, we're just want to go help this guy get his cart full of gold back to the town that it was stolen from. But they need guards to make sure it doesn't get robbed by bandits on the way. So, yeah, I definitely think you can think of like what are the upward beats and the downward beats of a campaign. I wouldn't plan them out too far.
I'd really think about like, you know, when when you should plan them is if you feel like the threats have been on there and if you kind of like looking and talking to the players and getting an idea from them that like, man. we're just constantly facing these cults that are always doing these cult stuff. And every one of them summoning some giant evil, that's going to destroy the whole world.
Well, maybe say, actually, it looks like you've managed to get back and they've been set back and you're good for a while. What would you like to do? Right? Dial that back a bit. I could do this in my own campaign, my city of arches campaign. I just introduced another world ending threat. They already have two others. Now they got a third world ending threat.
Do they really need to worry about all this? So what are some ways that you can reduce those threats and what are some ways you can make it clear to the players that those threats are reduced so that they feel like they have some room and some opportunity for some other quests? Really good, really good thought. Swingset Park says, did you say you're switching from Notion to Obsidian?
I'd love to know why and to get a tour of how you set it up for a session in campaign management. I am switching over from Notion to Obsidian. I've now been using Obsidian for a few months. I've used it with my two other campaigns that I don't do videos about. But the next campaign, when I do the Dragon Empire campaign I was talking about, I'm going to be using Obsidian for the Dragon Empire.
And the reason why is I really like operating directly in Markdown files as its native file structure type. Notion can export to Markdown, which is great. And I've loved Notion. I've used it for years. I like it a lot. I'm not going to stop using Notion, but I'm probably not going to be doing Notion for my campaign planning anymore.
And the reason why is it's a server based application run by a company. I have to make sure to export my data regularly to ensure that if they change something away, I don't like or if I want to move to something else.
I have to do so obsidian I don't have to work with that I have a local I have local file storage for my markdown files I'm able to use iCloud so I can still get access to it on my iPhone I know that it's backed up in two different places but I don't have to worry about like the whims of a company and how they're going to change.
It's also like, because it's a native application and not a web-based application, the performance on it's really good. Plugins are crazy. I'm actually not that into plugins. I use only like a couple of template plugins. There's tons and tons and tons of D&D plugins and RPG plugins that you can use. I'm a less is more kind of guy.
So my notes is actually, the notes that I'm using for my campaigns are even less formatted than the ones I was using in Notion. I don't have databases for things like character templates and location templates. I just sort of drop in pages when I need them. So I keep it relatively disorganized, but I still have like my campaign sheets.
The other nice thing is I have a little tool that lets me take my markdown notes and format them in a format called LaTeX, which makes a PDF that is easily printed so I can use them in my physical notebook as well. So that's the main reasons I'm using obsidian.
Now, if you want to see more about how I use obsidian and what the templates look like and stuff like that, I have templates available to patrons and your swing set park. I know you're a patron, so you can actually see my obsidian templates. I don't know if they're on the rewards page. I'll make sure to add them to the rewards page.
So if you want to see what it looks like, it's not going to blow your socks off. It's not the most impressive thing in the world. It looks like the eight steps stuck in a markdown page, right? Cause that's pretty much what it is.
but i will also be publishing my campaign notebooks on for patrons of sly flare so you can actually see like what my dragon empire campaign notebook looks like as it's expanding out i should do that with all of them because i already have a couple others so i'll make sure to do that as well but that's the main reason and if you want to see me using it in action then with my upcoming campaign my my lazy gm prep shows i will be doing it for the dragon empire so you can see that too
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