The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
D&D 2025 Monster Manual First Look – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 03 Feb 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 00:02:11 Product Spotlight: Horizon Magazine 00:07:31 D&D & RPG News: Alphastream on 2025 D&D Monster Manual Math 00:09:31 Commentary: D&D at Madison Square Garden 00:13:28 D&D & RPG News: Mike Mearls and Ray Winninger on the Past and Future of D&D 5e 00:15:42 Product Spotlight: 2025 Monster Manual Initial Thoughts 00:27:56 Product Spotlight: D&D 2025 Monster Manual Lich 00:32:28 DM Tip: Avoid Getting Caught in the Zeitgeist 00:44:13 Patreon Spotlight: Talk Show and Patreon Q&A Databases 00:47:13 Patreon Question: What D&D Classes and Features Do I Ban? 00:52:19 Patreon Question: Making Flat Paper Character Minis 00:54:34 Patreon Question: Dealing with Agency-Stealing Effects like Stun 01:00:32 Patreon Question: Basic Rules or 5.1 SRD for New Players Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Horizon Magazine Alphastream on 2025 D&D Monster Manual Math Ray Winninger and Mike Mearls on Past and Future of D&D 5e Printable Heroes
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to look at Horizon Issue 2. I'm going to talk about Teos Abadie Alpha Stream's excellent video on the Monster Manual math for the D&D 2025 Monster Manual. D&D, does your game look like the D&D game that took place at Madison Square Gardens? We're going to have a little bit of a conversation about that.
The fantastic thread about the early days of the fifth edition of D&D and the current version of fifth edition D&D with a discussion, a pretty heated discussion between two different leads for the D&D team took place over on EN World. The thread is now closed, but I thought it was worth talking about. It was a fascinating thread, probably the most interesting thread I've seen on EN World.
We're going to have a quick glance at the 2025 Monster Manual. I'm going to do a bigger review in a couple of weeks, but we're going to do just a quick little glance, and I'm going to give you some initial thoughts. Today's big DM topic is avoiding the zeitgeist, how not to get caught up in the giant turmoil of the RPG industry. This is really self-therapy is what you're going to see.
How do we not get caught up in the big zeitgeist of what's going on and remember that we are just there at a table playing a game with our friends? And we're going to have more questions from the Sly Flourish 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 show was brought to you by, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, databases, and...
scenarios and adventures and campaign books and all kinds of awesome stuff that you get for being a patroness life flourish it's a very reasonable price it directly supports me in the work that i do so if you like the work that i do and you want to give back that is a fantastic way to give back and you get access to the awesome lazy dm community that we have over on discord we have awesome conversations if you wanted for example yesterday when i received that yesterday was saturday my day off but i got the 2025 monster manual
And myself and patrons of Sly Flourish got to go through. I went on stage. I took a bunch of screenshots and we talked all about it. I think we probably spent like two hours talking about the 2025 Monster Manual. That sort of thing is the sort of thing that you get over in the Lazy DMs community that is available to patrons of Sly Flourish. Horizon Magazine.
So Horizon Magazine is published by Wild Mage Press. Hannah Rose is the editor-in-chief. Hannah Rose was the editor. She was the lead editor for Arcadia, which was the Dragon Style magazine that was being produced by MCDM a while back. And she has since left MCDM and now has a new publishing imprint, Wild Mage Press. And they are putting out a quarterly magazine called Horizons.
And this is Horizons issue two. And it's absolutely fantastic. You can get Horizons Magazine by subscribing to Horizons Magazine through their website and through Patreon. And that gives you access to Horizons Magazine now and quarterly access. And they release other things intermittently during the quarter. But holy cow, it is a really good-looking magazine. The layout is fantastic.
Editing is great. It's a really, really fun thing that very much reminds me of Dragon Magazine of old. One thing is that it actually covers a variety of different systems. So they've had Pathfinder 2 content in some of them. They still, of course, have a lot of 5e content in them. This one actually is the first time that they have some character options from Candela Obscura, which is another one.
It is a digital-only magazine. This is a PDF magazine. Nobody can afford to put magazines out in print anymore. It's very, very, very, very difficult to do. So some of the interesting things it has, this Ozeld's Tome of Esoteric Spells is really interesting.
It reminds me of one of the most popular supplements that I had used at my game, which was the Blasphemies of Bor Bwalesh, which was Robert Schwab's, some of Robert Schwab's spells from Shadow the Demon Lord converted to 5e. It was a very small PDF, but when I used it, I gave it to hags to use. And then the characters got access to some of the hag magic. And I have a player who still brings it up.
He's like, are those from the Blast Reviews of Warball? She remembers it years later. And this is kind of neat. So you can get giant books of spells like Deep Magic by Kobold Press. which have tons of them. But sometimes it's nice to get a supplement that only has a handful, because it's easier for you to read and process a handful of spells.
And this Ozeld's Tomb, which again has sort of these like different spells that might be forbidden. These are forbidden magic. So this is the kind of thing you might find in an old tomb. And the nice thing is you can tie them to magic items. You can tie them to spell scrolls that the characters get. You can give them to enemies. Spells are a really cool mechanic.
If you think about what a spell is, a spell is a really cool mechanic that you can apply to lots of different areas to your game. They won't break the game because there's only one of them. So it's not like a big deal. And if you want, you can make it like a single use magic item where they can cast the spell once.
And that way, if you're a little worried about it, you don't want them to be able to cast it all the time. You can put it on an item and it works. So lots of different things you can do. One thing I thought was pretty funny is, is they have this thing, content warning, blood and self-harm, right? And they're like, okay. And I think that's good.
You should have, you know, content warnings, I think are a good thing to have in magazines. So you know what you're going to get and stuff like that. And I was like, okay, oh, that's good. You know, blood and self-harm, by the way, watch out because you're going to see some blood and self-harm. And then you're like, oh, my God. Oh, look what he's doing.
He's like cutting his wrists and it's turning into like a weird spear. Right. And I thought it was kind of interesting that on one side, like, watch out, we're going to have some blooded content. It's like, God, like the next page is definitely, definitely got it. Really good art, though. He seems he seems OK with it. Really. He seems fine. Like he's bathing himself in armor. Right.
With his blood magic. So you have a bunch of different like cool blood magic spells. I haven't dug through all the spells here to see like what they've got, but this is a really cool way to grab some lore and drop it in your game. I should actually drop this into the game that I'm about to run. I'm going to run a game in about an hour and a half and it'd be pretty cool to take them.
Fantastic artwork in this book. So that's one group of the spells. There are other articles in here. I'm not going to dive through all of them. It's always nice to know that they're reaching out to kind of less known authors who may have not really had much of a chance to do anything like this. Where is it? There's like, who is it? James Intercaso. I don't know who that is.
But, you know, nice that they've got like a trap index. Trap index. Terrific trap index by James Intercaso. That sounds cool. I bet this guy's going places. I'm joking. Of course, James Intercastle is the lead designer over at MCDM. He's a good friend of mine. I've known the guy for, I don't know, 10, 12 years, 10, 10 years, I think. And fantastic designer wrote for Wizards of the Coast.
I've written for a number of different.
groups and wrote for mcdm and now is the mcdm lead designer on their new book draw steel he was the lead designer of flea mortals so i worked for him when we were writing monsters for flea mortals and he was the lead of her the mcdm design team when they were doing arcadia so he was the original editor-in-chief of arcadia he passed that on to hannah who now is running horizons and now james earncastle is writing for hannah on horizons which is really cool so i didn't know he was doing this but i think it's fantastic that you get to see james
cast are ready for this too you can see i mean the quality is as good as anything i've ever seen in an rpg product it is a really really beautiful really beautiful product and i really dig it and i am very happy to support them i do i should note that they did send me a preview copy of horizons but i am also a subscriber to horizons myself so really cool so that's horizons magazine really neat thing
If you're not aware, the Monster Manual, the 2025 Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, some of us have received review copies. And I did receive a review copy. I can start off with my disclaimer right away, which is Wizards of the Coast did send me a review copy of the 2025 Monster Manual. I got it yesterday. And, but other reviewers have had the PDF version of this far longer.
They were under an NDA, so they couldn't really talk much about it until I think like last week. And then even then they could not show anything that was actually in the book. We are not, I am not so constrained. I can actually, I can show stuff. Look at that. Oh, don't blur the video, but I'm going to be doing that in a couple of weeks. I am going to do a quick review.
I'm going to talk about it a little bit today, but I've only had a day with it. And even though I'd spent a fair bit of time with it during that day, I spent most of yesterday digging into it. I am not ready to do a show segment on it. And in fact, what we're going to do is in two weeks, I'm going to do a whole show where we do nothing but talk about the D&D 2025 Monster Manual.
And by then, a lot of you will have it too. So that will be nice. But Teos was one of the receivers of the original of that PDF. So he has had access to all the stat blocks of everything in the Monster Manual for a while. And finally was out from underneath his NDA and did an hour-long talk about the math changes behind the 2025 Monster Manual. It is a wonderful video.
He's got really interesting thoughts and ideas. He's done a lot of work.
He actually recorded in his own... He's not able to share the spreadsheet, but he has a spreadsheet where he recorded basically all of the baseline stats for every monster in it so that he could do an analysis of things like armor class and hit points and attack bonuses and damage output and things like that so that he could do a true analysis of what was going on there. Really good detail.
Fantastic video. You can find a link for that in the show notes at 2025 monster manual math changes. I am sure he's going to be talking about it on mastering dungeons as well. And he has had where I have had less than 24 hours with it. He has had months with it. So a fantastic talk. And you can find that in, you can find a link to that in the show notes. I thought this was interesting.
Rascal News had an interesting thing. And on me, the interesting thing was just the picture. So the thing was that Dimension 20 had an event on January 24th where they had 20,000 people watching the group play Dungeons and Dragons. And it's another reminder of just how wild this hobby is. When you think about like, I am going to be playing this game in an hour and a half.
I'm going to have me and my six friends and we're going to be playing on Discord and I'm going to be showing some stuff and we're going to be talking about them climbing through a ziggurat, looking for treasure and trying to unlock a portal so that they can connect up three cities together.
right and that we're going to be playing one thing and then in another game i my friends and i get around a table and we play and i use a wet erase marker on my chess battle mat and we talk about our game and we play and then you have a game like this where 20 000 people fill up an audience where like it was really hard like it was a lottery system to even get tickets for it and they've got these huge monitors and they've got like confetti and they've got like a light up stage and they've got all this kind of stuff on and it's like and it's still the same game
So I made a joke in my Discord server where I said like, does your game look like this? Why not? And it was a joke, right? But then there was some heated discussion about it of like, that is not D&D. And I argue it is D&D. It's D&D in the same way that the Super Bowl, if you compare, and we're gonna use sports metaphors. Hey, Teos and Sean, you can listen to my sports metaphor.
It is the equivalent of you and a couple of your friends and maybe some cousins that you see once a year going outside to throw the football around
after your thanksgiving dinner compared to the super bowl they are both football right and one of them is probably matters more to you because you're going to remember going out there with your friends and throwing the football around after thanksgiving maybe more so than watching the super bowl unless it's like a really great super bowl or anything like that right but boy think about the dollar difference between those one was like twelve dollars for you to go buy a football and then go out to the backyard and throw the football around
The other one was like God knows how many millions of dollars. It changes entire cities, right? Like if you go to Gen Con, you are still paying a tax to go to Gen Con based on the fact that they had a Super Bowl there like 15 years ago or something like that. It's bananas. But to me, that's actually, this is really a really cool thing.
It's cool that this game has traversed everything from like two or three players around a table with some paper and a pencil that you swiped from the local library. To Madison Square filling out Madison Square Garden. Right. That is fascinating to me. I just think it's really, really cool that the game has expanded this much that 20,000 people. I had a friend of mine who went to this.
I haven't had a chance to talk to her about it yet, but I heard that she got tickets and she went there and actually watched it. And I want to hear what that was like. Like, what was it like sitting in the thing? wow, are we in a different time for this hobby? And I think it's fantastic. I think it's, I don't think there's any negative aspect of this.
One of the common negative concerns is that this is giving a false impression of what the game is like. And I would not worry about that. First of all, we're making that up as a story. I have heard some anecdotes where people have comments said, oh, I thought this game was going to be more like it was on Critical Role. I'm sure it happens. I'm sure it's also rare.
And most people are just happy to sit down with their friends and play the game. So you don't need to worry about that. And certainly you don't have to worry about it on behalf of other people. We can worry about our own games. We don't have to worry about other people's games. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more when I talk about the Zeitgeist.
But in the meantime, I am personally fascinated by this idea. And I think it's really, really cool. And I love how our hobby has expanded from some people hanging around a table with some three by five cards and some pencils you swiped from the library all the way up to filling out 20,000 seats at Madison Square Garden in order to watch people sit around and play D&D.
It's the kind of thing many people can't even get their heads around, the idea that why would you ever want to watch people play D&D? 20,000 people work their asses off to go watch people play D&D. Really, really fascinating. I mentioned this last week that there was a really cool thread on Ian Whirl. I actually mentioned the original video, which is really good.
So there's a couple, Stan, so Stan, spelled S-T-A-N exclamation mark, is a cartoonist and a designer and he worked at TSR for a long time and he has a wonderful YouTube series where he's now done more than 50 interviews with current and former TSR and Wizards of the Coast employees talking about D&D, especially for the 50th anniversary of D&D.
I actually just started watching the one he did with James Wyatt this morning. It looks really, really fun. But I haven't gotten into enough, so I'm not about to talk about it. But he did one with Ray Winninger that I found particularly interesting. I wrote a post on EN World about it. EN World is a great forum that I like hanging out with, hanging out on and talking about it.
And I posted about that. And what was really interesting is, so Ray Winninger went on to EN World to explain some of this stuff. And Mike Merles, another lead designer of fifth edition of D&D, came on as well to talk about it. And both of them talked back and forth, sometimes a little, I don't want to say heated, but contrary to one another.
Mike Merles, for example, clarified that when Ray Winninger said in the interview that the only reason there were so few 5e products coming out was that they didn't really have a staff to do more. Mike Merles said, no, it was absolutely a strategy that we had early on. So really interesting conversation.
It unfortunately kind of turned into a heated discussion about fourth edition of D&D, which was unfortunate. It didn't need to go that way, but it ended up going that way. And the thread got shut down, but it is still an awesome thread. I wanted to link to it. And if you want to kind of dive into predictions about where 2024. four is going from some of the lead designers that are there.
Some of them optimistic, some of them not. If you just want to see the interesting conversations that took place, it is one of the best threads I have ever seen on the end world. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. It was really, really interesting. And I, I really, I participated. I was the one who created the thread. So I think I deserve an any just for creating the thread. I don't know.
I don't know how you submit thread, a thread creation as an any, I don't think you can. I did submit my other stuff for any. So my, this show is submitted. I submitted this show for an any, I should submit a slight flourish for an any, and I submitted city of arches for an any. So we can hope, but you can't, I don't think creating thread counts is doing an any, but it was, and what did I do?
I posted a video and I was like, Hey, this video is cool. It just turned into this really cool thread. So it was really, really, really, really neat. Anyway, you can find out in the show notes. 2025 Monster Manual. I received a review copy of the 2024 Monster Manual.
This will be available in stores one day after this video and podcast go live, which means you can pick it up at local stores with the cool special edition cover. Hopefully I got a special edition cover. I ordered one from my local game shop, so I bought one as well. I do want to give the disclaimer. I have two disclaimers to give. One is they did send me a review copy.
And two is that I do get free access to the material on D&D Beyond because I am a D&D Beyond insider because I used to write for them online. long ago. Those are two disclaimers I'm going to give. They did not otherwise tell me to do anything. They did not say, oh, you have to speak well and you will see because not everything I'm going to say is super great. They did not tell me to do anything.
I am under no other obligation with this material, but I did receive it. I spent a good time yesterday doing it on the Patreon. On our Patreon, we dug into the 2024 Monster Manual, looked at some of the stat blocks, talked about it, talked about the design, and had a really good two-hour conversation on the Sly Flourish Patreon Discord server. But I'm not going to do a deep dive right now.
Next week, I am not having a show. I'm going to be away at Winter Fantasy playing a whole bunch of D&D 2024. 2024 D&D at Winter Fantasy, which is a gaming convention in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I'm going to be there. I'm actually playing...
two other rpgs as well i'm playing shadow of the mad shadow of the weird wizard which i'm very excited about i am playing the fantasy star rpg by my friend rich leska flair i am running a shadow dark game and then i think michelle and i are playing in four or five dnd 2024 games seven three of them are seventh level starting at seventh level and going up to 10th level so i'll have a better idea of like what dnd 2024 is actually like when i'm playing that that game
But it means I won't have a show. So I'm not going to have a show next week. And I think by the time the week after comes around, I think we'll be very close to when the 2024-2025 Monster Manual will be released. And at that point, I'm going to dive deep into it. We're going to talk a lot about it. I'm going to do a whole show about
where we talk about the monster manual, but I wanted to give some quick glances at things. So, and I'm going to give you a stat block. We're going to show, we're going to look at a stat block. Don't look at the stat block yet. Just look at the, don't ignore that part. We'll, we'll dive into the stat block here in a second.
So from my, this is my initial thoughts, not a review, not a thorough thing, but I do come with a, I've done a ton of design for fourth, for fifth edition D and D I have played a whole ton, a thousand game more than a, I don't know if I played a thousand games.
I've played a lot, hundreds and hundreds of games I've played with fifth edition D and D I've done a bunch of fifth edition D and D monster design. And I've, I've done lots of reviews of for their products. So I feel like I have a pretty good experience level of,
understanding it that said i've got certain things that i look for more than other people look for and so it's always coming from my own from my own opinion on it and really we all get to choose what what matters so my main points one i'm gonna do a deep dive of the monster manual on 16 february which will be released on 17 february for podcast on the podcast and youtube
That one, we will actually be going through stat blocks. I will be going through the D&D Beyond version of it. So it's because it's easier for me to show stat blocks and stuff like that on D&D Beyond than it is to do physical screenshots and stuff like that. Plus Blurgate. I don't get involved in that again. So we'll be looking at stat blocks and talking about a lot of the design.
I also want to compare it to both 2014 monsters, but also monsters from Tales of the Valiant and monsters from the Level Up Advanced 5e. Because I think we now have all of these different monster sets. I might take a look at some MCDM monsters as well. People want me to look at MCDM monsters, but that might be so many. I might want to do that another time. All right, so is it good? Yes, it's good.
Is it better than the 2014 Monster Manual? Yes, it's better than the 2014 Monster Manual. If you want a D&D Monster Manual, this is the one to get. It is really, really good. It's got 500 monsters. There's a lot of improvements. It looks really good. The physical design is great. The artwork is really cool. The layout is great. It's got a lot of things, a lot of things to love.
Lots of aspects that I really like. probably the number one benefit that it has is that monsters now hit at their challenge rating almost all the time so this was a problem that dnd 2014 had where certain monsters had like trap abilities where they were expected to behave a certain way only when certain things happened
So examples were you'd have certain monsters where it was assumed that they would be able to inflict a status effect, and therefore the status effect would reduce the amount of damage they did to account for it, and then they'd do less damage if the status effect didn't work. So this one looks really, really solid.
They did a much better job of the monster hitting at its challenge rating for most monsters in the book. It's not 100%, it's not perfect, but it definitely hits them all. So that's one thing. Is it better than the 2014 Monster Manual? Yes. Is it an improvement? Yes, it is. But now we're in a different world.
And in that different world, we have other options like the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault and like Level Up Advanced 5e's Monstrous Menagerie. Both products, which I really, really like. So the question is, is this better than both of those? Honestly, I wish I could say yes. I just want one awesome monster book so I don't have to worry about the other ones.
But the reality is they all have advantages over the others. They all have advantages over the others and they all have disadvantages over the others. So it's hard for me to point at any one book and say that book is definitely better than the other. One thing I will say is my cursory look, I'm happy to take this back,
i think i trust the tales of the valiant monster vault more than i trust this book to for monsters to hit at their challenge rating and for them to have abilities that are easy for me to use at the table the example that i bring up is the cult fanatic the cult fanatic is my one i probably know my favorite stat block in the 2014 monster manual and the cult fanatic in the tales of the valiant monster vault in my opinion is definitely superior to the the cult fanatic engineer but we'll definitely take a look at that later
So it's not a toss-up. That said, there's way more monsters in here, and this one has the D&D iconic monsters that you can't publish elsewhere, like Mind Flayers, like Githyanki, like Beholders. Those are all in here, right? So you get monsters in here that you can't get anywhere else.
And there's some new ones, like the Arch Hag is really cool, the Blob of Annihilation is cool, everything like that. But the thing to keep in mind is, even though I might say, oh, I like some of the monster stat blocks. I don't know. So far, I think all the ones that I've looked at, I like them better in Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault. This still doesn't mean that these are bad or unusable.
These are still very, very usable stat blocks. So I think it's really good. But right now, I would say it's a toss-up on which monster book is best, which is really good because they're all very good. And I would say this is very good. The biggest sin. Here it is. This is the problem. The biggest sin that this book commits.
And in my opinion, it's bad because this is something we knew was a problem 10 years ago. is that it buries some of the most useful abilities that monsters have in the spellcasting block and doesn't describe what they do. Which means if you want to follow through with some of these monsters, you have to then get your player's handbook out and look it up.
And now I need two different books at the table and I have to go back and forth. And in many cases, several cases I'll say, Not only does it have a spell casting thing in the stat block saying, oh, the dragon's going to cast Guiding Bolt. And you've seen it if you've seen the Ancient Gold Dragon. The Ancient Gold Dragon, you can see it cast Guiding Bolt.
And they made a big deal about this in the videos. Oh, look, our dragons now can cast spells. Well, no, the dragon actually kind of needs to cast those spells in order to hit it as challenge rating given circumstances. And you didn't spell them out. So I got to go learn what they do.
And what's even worse is in many cases, they're upcast, which means I got to not only know what the spell does, I have to remember what the upcast does. That's a pain, right? That to me is a real pain. And it was something that even Wizards of the Coast didn't. talked about in their design blogs for Monsters of the Multiverse.
So when they were designing Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse, I don't think I have that on my shelf. I can't pull it off. But when they were designing monsters from Monsters of the Multiverse, they said things like, we know that some of the abilities of this are buried in spells and we're going to move them out of the spell block and into the main core block so you can see them.
I don't remember the exact quote, but I know that, and I've talked about with some other designers, like, yeah, they pretty much said that. They pretty much said that there was a reason why they did things. And if you look at the wizards, there's a bunch of different wizard stat blocks in Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse.
And the evoker wizard, for example, has a fireball-like ability that is fully spelled out and actually operates differently than a fireball. It does more damage and you can sculpt it around people because it makes sense because it's an evoker wizard. But that means when I run that wizard, it feels like a wizard and I don't have to look anything up.
many monsters in the 2025 monster manual don't have that ability. And you have to go look up a spell in order to do it. And I think that that is, it makes the book less usable by, to me, a significant amount. Like that was something, the disappointing thing for me is in 10 years, we knew that was a problem. We knew it was a problem right away.
I had people that told me right away, I don't find this book usable at all. And it's way worse than the fourth edition books because the fourth edition books had everything in there. And now I got to go look stuff up. And that was a complaint in 2014. And now it's 10 years later and we're going to have the same complaint. So that to me is the real, the biggest sin.
There's one other sin, which I'm going to talk about more next time, which is the omission of drow and orcs and duergar.
And I think there's a couple of other stat blocks that they, instead of, in my opinion, having the adult conversation about how to handle sentient races in a way that isn't, that, you know, they handle them in a better way so that you're not creating this myopic view of an entire race that all orcs are a bunch of savages and all, you know, all goblins are black-hearted little thieves.
I feel like they bypassed that situation by removing, like literally removing the stat blocks for them So instead of having an adult conversation about how to treat orcs in your game, they just remove orc from the monster manual completely, right? And then they say, oh, well, you can go use the tough stat block or you can go use the gladiator stat block. Same thing with the drow, right?
Rather than have drow in there, and talk about how to treat drow so that you're not creating this stereotypical view so that all drow are a bunch of loth-worshipping, bloodthirsty jerks, that there are other ways that you can treat drow. And what's interesting is they do that for other monsters in the book, like the lizard folk and like the minotaur.
So I don't know why they did it for ones and the other. I feel like they punted on the topic. And instead of covering the topic, which they could have covered in the Dungeon Master's Guide and they could have covered in the Monster Manual, instead they're making no one happy by simply saying, oh, we're just going to pretend orcs don't exist anymore. So I think that that is actually a real problem.
I'm gonna dive into that a little bit more when I do my thorough review. But I think that that was a mistake. But the reality is in my one day look, again, I've had it less than 24 hours. And in the 24 hours where I've looked at the monster manual, I think it serves just fine. It means that D&D 2024 is, works. It serves just fine.
I so far have not seen anything across all three books where I say, well, that's the end of this edition. It doesn't play nearly as well as 2014. In many ways, it is an improvement over 2014. There's a couple of things that scare me about the system overall, like all of the added character abilities and what that'll do to combat length.
But when it comes to monsters, like one thing I'll say is all my complaining about the monsters that I just did, they're still better than the 2014 versions. And we've been using the 2014 versions for 10 years. Many players have only ever used the 2014 stuff and it worked just fine.
So this will work better, which means that in my opinion, the D&D 2024 set is better than the 2014 set because they improved a lot of the things that needed improvement. like encounter balance guidelines, like monsters that hit at their challenge rating. Lots of things that they've done that I think have improved the game of fixing a whole bunch of problematic spells.
It's a bunch of things that they've done in order to smooth it out. So I think we're pretty good. So I'm going to do a much deeper look at the 2025 Monster Manual in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to give some thoughts about it right now because I've had it and because it's worth doing. But let's look at a stat block. We today are going to look at The Lich.
For the record, in case anybody is wondering, I have permission from Wizards of the Coast to show pictures from the book. I just can't show entire chapters, and I have to meet fair use. Who gets to decide that?
Because fair use is not, there's no clear absolute guidance on what is or isn't fair use, but I'm pretty sure showing one stat block falls within Wizards of the Coast's range of that's probably okay. So we're going to look at the Lich, because the Lich is one of my favorite stat blocks. It is also a stat block that in the 2014 guide, I don't think I ever ran it right.
And now we have a different kind of Lich. So let's dive into this one. I have kind of two benchmarks that I look at when I'm looking at a particular monster. One is how are its hit points compared to its challenge rating? And two is how is the damage compared to its challenge rating?
One of the things that you'll see right off the bat, and this talks about this, like you can't run it wrong, is that if you take the lich's least kind of basic attacks, it should still hit at its challenge rating. And the example is it's multi-attack. So the hit points are fine. 315 hit points at challenge rating 21. That's about 15 hit points per challenge rating. That's really good.
AC 20, lots of other stuff going on. Most of the creatures that have legendary resistance now have more than three. I don't know about that. I think that I've already had players who basically, as soon as they find out that a monster has legendary resistance, they just don't even bother to cast anything that might use it. On the other hand, now you've got topple and stuff like that.
So it could be that you want to have more legendary resistances to deal with stuff like that. Multi-attack. The lich makes three attacks using Eldritch Burst or Paralyzing Touch in any combination. Eldritch Burst does 31 damage. So that's three. So it's doing 90 points of damage just with its action on the assumption that all you're doing is using the multi-attack Eldritch Burst action.
It can also do Paralyzing Touch, but Paralyzing Touch does less damage. So we're not going to look at that. Then you have legendary actions, and you get three of these things. And you have Deathly Teleport. Teleport's 60 feet to an occupied square, and each creature within 10 feet of the space it left takes 11 necrotic damage.
Disrupt Life, which is each creature that isn't in a 20-foot emanation from the lich, takes 31 necrotic damage. and Frightening Gaze, where it can do a fear. So what it can't do is more of those Eldrick bursts as legendary actions, but that's probably okay. So the Deathly Teleport, it can do three times, up to three times, but it's probably gonna do it twice.
So we're gonna look at doing Deathly Teleport twice, which was 22, whenever you're looking at an area attack, the general assumption is you're hitting two targets. Sometimes you hit more, sometimes you hit less, but generally speaking, you can expect to hit two targets. So that means that that's 44 damage.
So we have 93 and then you have disrupt life, which does 31 damage around it, but you count that as 62. So that's plus 62 and that's 199, which gives it a challenge, a damage per challenge rating of,
of 9.4 so about nine damage per challenge rating my benchmark is about seven which means the lich is now hitting good and hard which i think is good what i also like is it's a pretty slim stat block now this one doesn't suffer
quite as much from the spells being in the spellcasting block because you can run this lich and never look at any of the spells in the spellcasting block and it'll run just fine. But if you wanted to do something like power word kill or chain lightning or finger of death, you can always replace one of those. You can always replace it. Now the question is like,
you know power word kill can kill somebody with 100 hit points but you know the eldrick burst do 91 points so it's actually pretty close chain lightning is sort of the same way are you really getting a bitter bigger benefit from chain lightning than you are from elder doing three elder bursts that's kind of a question sometimes you might sometimes you don't but i don't unlike some of the other stat blocks in here i don't feel like this step like buried the lead in the spell casting blocks
There are other ones where the legendary abilities of the monsters say it can cast Guiding Bolt, like the Ancient Gold Dragon did. It could cast Guiding Bolt at level four as a legendary action. Now you're making me go look that up. So I really like the Lich. I hope you like the Lich. This is, I think, a really good version of the Lich.
And in my opinion, vastly improved over the Lich that was in the 2014 guide. And I think that this is a good representation of the kind of spell blocks that you're going to see certainly for higher CR monsters throughout you go. Not all of them are perfect. But I think it's really, I think it's a really good stat block. So there is your Lich stat block. Stay tuned.
In two weeks, we're going to dive crazy into it and look at the whole D&D 2025 Monster Manual. But I wanted to give you a little taste. And the little taste here is that Lich. Probably for the last couple of years, it's been really easy to fall into what I'm calling the zeitgeist of the tabletop role playing game community. What you're going to hear now is almost me talking to myself.
It's a little bit of self therapy going on right now. Because this is something I do all the time. If you're familiar with my show, if you're familiar with what I talk about, I'm talking about the RPG zeitgeist constantly. I'm adding to the RPG zeitgeist. I'm trying to steer it.
I try hard to always reinforce the idea that what really matters in this hobby is the game that you and your friends play when you're sitting around your table. And that's really the core of this whole topic is to not get caught up in the zeitgeist of tabletop role-playing games.
And remember that the important thing is you getting together with your friends around a table, whether it's virtual or whether it's physical, whether they're new people you haven't met before or people that you've been playing with for 20 years. What matters is getting together with people and enjoying a fun role-playing game.
And it's so easy to get caught up in the business of TTRPGs, the larger hobby of TTRPGs, the media, the marketing, the products themselves, the design. It's so easy to get caught up in all of that and kind of forget a little bit or have a little less emphasis on how important the game itself is around the table. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit today and where some of the traps are.
and just kind of reinforce that importance of that focus. Because the only thing that really matters is that time that we're spending with our friends at the table. That's really what matters. And the systems that we play and the mechanics of those systems probably matter a lot less than we think.
There are some games where the mechanics matter a lot and the feeling of the game changes quite a bit from one game to another. And we definitely have different ways that people play. And really, every table is sort of playing the game in a different way.
But if you think about all the stuff I just talked about with the Monster Manual 2025, and if you've heard me talk about other game design things... we get into the weeds a lot. And the reality is it's fine. It's been fine. It's played for 50 years. And if you think back to those original versions of D&D that were hardly playable, you could read them and nobody understood them.
Nobody understood how weapon speed worked. Nobody understood how initiative worked. There were whole components of the game that were missing. And yet it was still a really popular game and people really liked playing with it.
That, you know, it's easy to get caught up in all of that mechanic stuff and just forget that like what really matters is getting together with our friends around the table and playing the game. It's also like the one of the both the benefit and the and the hazard of our interconnected world now. And it's been interconnected as long as D&D has been around.
Like we've had Usenet and we've had forums and we've had newsletters and magazines and stuff like that where we've been connecting with other fans of the game since the game has been around 50 years ago.
But certainly now with forums and social media and videos and podcasts and all of these kinds of things, it's been easier and easier for us to connect to other hobbyists of the game, to creators of the game and to everybody else and have all of these conversations. And the benefit of there's a huge benefit to that. which I'll get to, but there's also the drawback.
And the drawback is that we could get so caught up in those conversations. We forget about what the core of the game is, or we ignore the core of the game, or it even could draw us away from the core of the game. We could get worried about things or depressed about things or, or just feel bad about it.
And then actually pull ourselves away from the game that matters to us, the actual thing itself, the core of the thing itself. The benefit is we learn from everyone. We have the opportunity to learn from everyone. And we can learn new ways to play. We can learn new games to try out. We can learn solutions to problems that we have.
My whole goal in this entire industry is to help GMs run great games by both understanding the games themselves and how people play them, and then refining that down to things that can help each of us run our games. That's my whole racket, right? I've been doing it on Sly Flourish for more than 10 years. 15 years about that 15 years I've been doing it.
I do it in my book, return to the lazy dungeon master. I've done it lots of places. I want to learn from everywhere, take the good stuff, filter it down, refine it, and then bring it back out as tips that we can use to actually help our games at our table. And in that way, the larger zeitgeist is a huge benefit. It's been a huge benefit to the game overall.
Many of the people that have worked at wizards of the coast talked about the benefit of being able to watch people play the game online and And learn that way has been a massive way for new people to learn how to play. That before it was like this like secret ritual where you had to like go find people and go to their basement and watch them play. And then you understood.
And it drove a lot of people to not play. But now people are very familiar with live play games. They can watch games online. They see it. They go, oh, that's what this is like. By the way, that looks really cool. Hey, we could go do that. And now people are learning more. I think this was true as much as like five or six years ago.
Wizards of the Coast said that more people were learning about how to play D&D online than they were from friends. And it was the first time that had happened in 45 years of the game's history. That's the benefit of the zeitgeist.
but we can get caught up in these arguments and we end up in disagreements and we feel that other people are doing it wrong and we have to solve them or that they're somehow hurting the hobby, that the way that they're bringing it up is damaging everything and that we have to stop them from doing that. They're saying a thing and it has to be stopped. And I am totally guilty of this.
When I see a book, I'm going to spoil. I'm going to give a Vecna Eve of Ruin spoiler. So if you are playing or want to play Vecna Eve of Ruin,
now's your time to skip forward for i don't know a couple minutes to skip it when i read vecna eve of ruin and realized that the whole campaign focused around the betrayal of an npc to the characters i felt like it was my mission to help people avoid that because it's such a bad trap and i still believe this very thoroughly don't betray the characters trust
Like your players will never trust you again. And it's not even a character betrayal. It's a player betrayal. And that one's egregious because it's a huge campaign. And you suddenly find out the whole reason you've been going on this giant campaign was all a ruse because there was no practical way for you to figure out that a bad guy was a bad guy.
And I was like, I've got to help people with this. And I wrote posts on EN World about it. And I talked about it on this show. But then it's also like, it's not my responsibility to help everybody with that adventure. And there were people who disagreed with me. And I couldn't understand why. But I mean, I couldn't understand their arguments.
But I recognized the fact that they disagreed with me and that they weren't necessarily wrong. So if there are people out there who said, no, it's fine. It can work out. Okay. Okay. But I still get driven by the zeitgeist of saying like, I need to protect people.
I need to protect, you know, anybody who's listening to me needs to be protected from ruining like the trust of their players by running an adventure that's built around a betrayal, a huge long-term betrayal. But it's easy to get caught up in that. And again, forget, oh, but I'm not going to do that at my game. I just won't do that.
And I will, I will write an article about it and I'll do a video about it and I'll do what I can to kind of make my case. And then the people that agree with my case can say, ah, okay, good to know. Or other people go, yeah, right on. And off we go. So I think that that's something I definitely need to remember. Right now is a really good time to remember because the new D&D 2024 books are out.
Everybody's kind of talking about it. There's a lot of interest and a lot of different aspects to it that people want to discuss. And everybody's kind of diving into it. And we all wonder what's going to happen. Is the hobby dying? Is that hobby going to surge? Is it going to die? Is it going to be about the same? I think you safely bet that it could be about the same.
I don't know if it's going to keep growing like it's been growing because you can't grow like that forever. That's sort of exponential growth. But, you know, probably even out. So, you know, but how much does that matter to you and your friends? If you've got a solid group and you're enjoying your time, what else do you need? Right.
But there is one very limited resource that exists for tabletop role playing games. really two limited resources that exist for tabletop role-playing games that are worth paying attention to. And it's players, finding players to play in our games and the time that we all have to make available for this game when we're playing it. And they're really kind of the same thing.
That one of the reasons why we don't have as many players or that it can be hard to find players for the games we want to play is because it's a bigger time commitment that people are used to. And the same reason that for us, we have to carve out chunks of our lives in order to do this.
I am extremely lucky to have three different regular groups that are willing to carve three hours a week or three hours every other week Or more because they're traveling, you know, and in some cases they drive to my place and then they drive home again. So we could even say about four hours. That's a big chunk of time.
And I think about that because I want to make sure my game is fun enough for them that we all have a really good time and that it's worth it for their time to get together. And the good news is that for some of those groups, we've been doing it for almost 20 years. And it's been fun enough that they continue to come for almost 20 years to come play games.
So we should not forget that fact, too, that the time that we spend with our friends and the time our friends spend with us to play this game is extremely precious and extremely valuable. And that's the one area where the zeitgeist of the game and what matters at our table really connect.
And that's making sure that the zeitgeist, we want the zeitgeist to be big enough that people are continually finding out about the game, interested in the game and willing to join our group when other people have other life circumstances that bring them out. I'm really lucky that I've almost never really had trouble in the last 20 years of finding new people to play a game with. Right.
Every so often it's like, well, not quite the right mix or I have to kind of figure out which bush to shake in order to find players that I think will gel well at the game. But generally speaking, I've not had trouble finding players to play games. And that includes playing a lot of different kinds of RPGs, many different versions of 5E.
I think I've played now all four versions of 5E and Shadow Dark and Blades in the Dark and Cyber Numenera and lots of other games that we've been playing. And I have other new games I want to play too, like 13th Age and Shadow of the Weird Wizard are two games I really want to play in the next year. I don't think I'm going to have trouble finding players for that.
And one of the reasons I'm not having trouble is because the hobby is big enough that people know about the game. People are interested in the game and people are coming, willing to carve out the three to four hours a week, or sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less in order to find people. But finding people to play our games is really hard. It's the hardest part of this hobby.
It has been the hardest part of this hobby ever since this hobby has existed. I think it's better now than it used to be, but it's always tricky and it's always something to remember. So my main point in all of this is to remember not to get too caught up into the zeitgeist of the game.
Don't worry so much about the mechanics of the game or the changes that have been occurring, especially if you're looking at fifth edition D&D, the changes that are occurring to the game. We can get mad about them. I'm mad about you.
If you just saw me rant about how I don't like the fact that they have spell that they're bearing, they're bearing powerful abilities under the spellcasting block in the monster manual. Does that really matter? No. No, it really doesn't. Like, it's fine. And I've said that, like that monster manual is fine. And it means that at my table, it'd be fine too.
Like when I run D&D 2024, I'll probably run with all D&D 2024 stuff and all three books are fine. And I think we'll have a good time. So the main message is don't let getting caught up in the zeitgeist take away from remembering the importance of having fun around the table with your friends.
That the time that you spend with your friends around the table enjoying a game is far more valuable, far more precious, and far more important than any of the big swirling news or the latest YouTube videos or whatever the biggest scandal is or whatever weird design thing has come out or whatever new version of a game has come out.
None of that really matters compared to you sitting around the table with your friends having fun with the game. I mentioned the fact that I am not going to be having a show next week. I am going to be at Winter Fantasy. So we will not have a talk show next week. We will not have a podcast or a prep show next week. I'll probably put up a tip video on YouTube if you want to see that.
But in the meantime, you can always go back to my old channels and look at stuff. Patrons of Sly Flourish actually get a couple of features. that they can help them navigate a lot of the material that we talk about on this show. One of them is the talk show database. So I have done many years of this talk show. I do it very weekly.
And each one of the talk shows has many different segments of things that we talk about. And I wanted to not only offer those videos, which of course you can get in a playlist on YouTube, but I wanted to offer the segments. And so I have a database here. It is a downloadable single HTML file database. that has every segment that I have done on the show going back to 2020.
So five years worth of video segments. And you can go here and you can do a search for like every time I've talked about the Monster Manual, you can do a search to see 2025 Monster Manual videos. What do I want from WOTC after the Monster Manual? Flee mortals, not a Monster Manual replacement and MCDM's new Monster Manual are topics that I've done. If you wanna do a search for monsters,
You can do a search for monsters and find every segment. And this includes all patron questions that I've answered on the talk show. It's on a very simple database. You can search it. And when you click on them, like here's a book monsters of Drakenheim that I did back in April of 2024. And when you click that, it goes to that segment. It goes to that segment of the video.
So you can watch just the part of the video that you want to see. So this talk show database, I put this together really so that I could also index all of my videos and find the different segments so I can link them to people. But this is available to patrons of Sly Flourish. It's just one of many different features you get by being a patron of Sly Flourish. Another feature is the Q&A database.
So we now have thousands of questions that have been asked and answered on the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A. I have put all of these together into a big downloadable database so you can search and say things like theater of the mind. And you can find the questions that I have answered where I've talked about Theater of the Mind. These are all the ones that are available to patrons of Slife Flares.
So it's all the answers that patrons of Slife Flares get, which often includes links to other things that I've talked about in other places. So anytime, this is a really handy, again, it's a single downloadable. You can download a copy and keep a local copy of it. So you have a copy of all of the questions that I've ever answered and all the answers that I've given in a local repository.
So you don't have to trust that I keep it up forever. You can always have your set. All of my tools are that way. These are just a couple of many different tools that I offer on the Patreon of Sly Flourish. All of them are downloadable and savable so that you can keep your own copies and you don't have to trust that they stay up forever.
So those are two examples of Patreon tools that help you navigate all of the material that I've been creating, both on the show and questions that I've asked, questions that have been asked and answered on the Patreon Q&A. Let's look at our next set of questions from the Patreon Q&A. Every quarter now, we put up a new thread on Patreon.
Every patron can ask a question related, a monthly question related to tabletop role-playing games. I answer every question every Friday. Some of those questions I bring here to the show so that we can talk about them and dive in a little deeper. Ryan says, what 2014 D&D classes slash builds slash spells would you not allow at your table and why? Just WOTC stuff.
You've mentioned a few times various things you don't like, but I couldn't find it all in one place. Myself, I just give to a no combatant allies blanket rule to cap combat tracking complexity. So rangers with pets are not allowed and summoning spells are generally limited to non-combat uses for exploration, etc. So yeah, I agree with you about, so the pets I'm okay with.
Like if a character has a single creature that operates, I think that's fine. So like wizards with familiars, rangers with pets, that's not so bad. The summon woodland beings kind of thing where like, oh, now one player now has nine initiatives and they got nine monsters they can move around. That I don't think is great. And unfortunately, so the good news is 2024 D&D took care of that.
The Tales of the Valiant did not. And the Level Up Advanced 5e book kind of handles it a little bit. But I actually think that the 2024 book did a better version of that. As far as classes and builds and spells would I not allow, it's actually a pretty small list. And I allow all the classes, right? So any of the D&D, any of the base classes, including the Artificer, I have included at my table.
I haven't limited people on that. And one thing I do for each campaign, though, is we limit it to a set of sources, period. And I usually do like one to three sources. So in some cases, like if I were running a new game, let's say I was going to run a D&D 2024 game, it would only be D&D 2024. I would tell players, let's try this new edition. Let's see how it is on its own.
Let's not crud it up by adding a bunch of Xanathar stuff or pulling a subclass from the 2014 book or any of that. Let's just play with the D&D 2024 player's handbook. What that does is it also means that it's easier for players to navigate their stuff because they only need one book. They only ever have to look at that one book.
Now, D&D Beyond, of course, makes it really hard in order to focus on just the stuff that's in that book, which is a real pain in the ass with D&D Beyond. But I would also recommend that people use paper character sheets. By the way, I eat my own dog food. Yesterday I made, or the last couple of days, I made three different characters for D&D 2024 by hand with a pencil and it was fine.
In fact, I got really fast. Later segment, I'm going to talk about how to make characters quickly in D&D 2024 because there's a few tricks. The real trick is instead of backgrounds, just separate all the things that you'd normally get in a background and just pick them all independently. But there are certain things that will just not hit my table. I will filter them out.
And the examples are the Peace Cleric and the Twilight Cleric subdomains from Tasha's I think are unbalanced. I think that not only are they overpowered, but they even make the game harder to run overall. I have not experienced the Peace Cleric myself. I've only ever experienced the Twilight Cleric.
But the Twilight Cleric with the constant extra temporary hit points that happen on everybody's turn is like everybody gets another turn, another phase in their turn. And that phase is get more hit points all the time. It's crazy overpowered. It means it's like having an eight point damage threshold constantly, right?
Imagine if you said, oh, all of my characters get to subtract eight from the damage monsters do. That's what having a Twilight Cleric is like. Peace Cleric does some weirdness where, like, if you do, you know, Peace Cleric plus Bless, you get, like, everybody gets, like, you know, a plus five on everything, right? And so that one, reading it made it look like, I don't want to deal with that.
So I really feel like the balance for Tasha's was not great. So those are two subclasses I don't allow. I'm not gonna ever allow Silvery Barbs. We all know about Silvery Barbs being really bad, but also I always think it's weird that it's even a question because Silvery Barbs is from one source book that's Strixhaven. Why is everybody using this one spell from Strixhaven all the time?
The reason why is D&D Beyond is broken. So the only reason that Silvery Barbs is a problem is because D&D Beyond is a problem. Right? If they'd had good source filtering, so you could say, oh, no, we're only using this. And we're only using material that are available in these books. And I never want to see the other ones unless they're in this book. You wouldn't have that problem.
But if anybody owns it and anybody's part of the campaign, suddenly everybody can see it. And then suddenly you can add it to your spells. So I wouldn't allow that either. There are other spells where I'd want to have an adult conversation with a player and say, hey, perchance, could you not use it this way?
For example, if we were using the summon spells in Tales of the Valiant, for example, I would say, like, can you always summon the largest, the smallest number of large monsters rather than the largest number of small monsters? Because it's just too much of a, you know, it's just too much of a pain. It's not really a direct nerf. It's just like, could you not do that?
The other one would be like everybody that dips into classes just to get shield. I would be like, can you just not do that? We already know shield is overpowered. You don't need an AC of 26. Can you just find another build other than I'm going to be the guy that never gets hit by anything.
So those are some things that I would do, but I don't really have like the hard list, but those are some of the ones that come to mind when you ask this question. John N. says, I absolutely love your advice and had the trick that I've been using for the Ruins of the Grindelwald campaign. Yay, Ruins of the Grindelwald campaign.
I bought game card stands from Amazon, link below, and made a Microsoft Word document with appropriate size full-color mirror images of the monsters slash bosses and sent them to a local print shop, i.e. FedEx office, for full-color heavy paper prints. I don't have a color printer and it's relatively inexpensive, about $1.50 a page. And for some really stand out images for my players.
I just cut them out, glue stick, fold in half and placed in the color standee for multiple opponents for the same monster. Yeah.
great trick right and if you look at it printable heroes who's a patron that i that i that i belong to printable heroes does awesome work with making two-dimensional you know what we call like two and a half d because they're like they're they're paper standees and has really good you know ways to print them out in pdf so that you can get them beautiful beautiful stuff and they work really well a new one that i just saw for that if you wanted to like get in with a group order for you and your players when you're starting a campaign
on your assumption that your character is going to live long enough that it's worthwhile is hero forge now has 2d acrylic miniatures that are very reasonably priced especially getting all the customization that you can do michelle my wife just recently got two of these one of my players and one of my games got one and they look great they look as good as regular minis as far as i'm concerned they're they're nice thick acrylic they're they're laser cut around the image
They're very durable. You don't have to worry about them breaking. They fold flat. Like you can pop it out of its stand and lay it flat. So it's really portable. They look really, really good. So that's a cool option too. It's a little bit more expensive. I don't know if you can do that overseas, but I know in the States, they're like 16 bucks a piece, right?
For a custom mini, like 16 seems a little high, but it's like, it's already full color. You don't have to do any painting or anything like that. And you can generate a very specific character mini. And that's way less money than getting a 3D printed version of that creature. So, and it's more durable too. So I like that too. So yeah, there's lots of good tricks.
And this one is a good one where you can, Print out your stuff on a sheet of paper, use a glue stick, do some crafting work and make yourself some really fun two-dimensional paper miniatures that are custom made for the character that you've got. Really good trick. John G says, I'm wondering if you've ever struggled with a loss of choice and fun caused by a status effect.
I agree with your what is realistic and what is fun, but several rules as written status effects like paralysis, unconsciousness, petrification, stunned, etc.
are perhaps realistic, but one, totally kill the fun for the players that are looking to see their characters do something cool, but at best lose the ability to make a choice on their next turn, roll a save, count down a timer, or worse, continually lose their turns. Two, on some level makes the group healer the gatekeeper for fun. Yeah. So it's a big one. And I do, I have a dirty trick.
It's in the Lazy DM's Companion. So in the Lazy DM's Companion, we have a stress effect. It's one of my favorite pages in this book. I love this book and I use it all the time. And stress effects, one of the things that I talk about in here, so stress effects is sort of my drop-in replacement for madness.
And there's lots of different ways that a stress effect could hit you, like witnessing a ghoul devouring a body or staring into a scrying pool showing the abyss. And then what I have people do is they roll and there's a different stress effect.
And the neat thing is that way it gives some theme to the idea, oh, you're not just stunned or feared, you instead have one of these things, like a terrible memory of your past comes to your mind, or you scream as blood flows from your mouth. Cool stuff, right? But one of the things I have is that you can add this, on a failed save, the character becomes stunned for one minute.
The character can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of their turns, and whenever they take damage, ending the effect on themselves is a success. If the character is saving through a successful, the effect ends for it if the character is immune to the effect for 24 hours.
A character can also choose to break this effect at the start of their turn by taking four 1d8 psychic damage per two character levels. A lesser restoration or equivalent effect likewise negates the area. And then in parens, I say, you can also apply this mechanism for breaking an effect by taking psychic damage to characters who are frightened, stunned, or incapacitated.
So one thing you can do is you can basically, you could also do it by challenge rating. You could essentially say like you take, you know, 1D, what would it be? Somewhere along the lines of like 1D6 per challenge rating of the effect. And in psychic damage, maybe that might be a lot because that'd be like if the challenge rating 10 to be 10D6.
so you might do like a half of that you have to kind of determine how much damage you want them to apply but the way to do it is give them a choice at the beginning of their turn you can break out of this fear but doing so you're going to take 5d6 psychic damage right you want to kind of know what it is ahead of time and give them the option if they say yeah i'll do it then you roll 5d6 they take the damage and then they're out of the effect and go back into play i think that's a good trick it's a trick and actually you see some monsters in the dnd 2025 monster manual now have that trick i haven't seen a lot of them but there's one or two of them that do
And it's a neat way to do it. You kind of have to figure out exactly what the right amount of damage is, depending on the ability. You know, there's some tables in the lazy DMs companion that offer like how much damage you can do for different kinds of abilities and effects and things like that.
So you can find some stuff in the workbook that offer like how much damage at a different tier they might take the damage severity by tier tables that you can often find. That might be a good one on like how much damage you treat it almost like a trap, right? And if they were going to break stun, then they can do it as a trap. So that's one trick.
And that one works for all of the debilitating effects. You can always use it. If you want to get break free from this, the one thing you probably don't want to do is say that if they have resistance to it, that they're resistant, you probably want it to break through resistance. So they would take it even if they're resisting. But very few people have resistance to psychic damage.
And if they have resistance to psychic damage, maybe you say it works fine. Another one is to kind of redo the ability itself. So instead of stun, you could treat it like slow, like, oh, you're stunned. That means you can take or you just replace stun. You don't call it a stun.
And instead you say, because you fail your saving throw, you could take either an action, a move or a bonus action, but only one of those. And you lose reactions. And now they can at least do something. There's some choice. Do I want to move? Do I want to take my action? Treat it like they got hit with slow, right? And that way they can still do something. They can just do less.
So if you look at the abilities for slow, for the spell slow, that's a good one to use for things like being stunned or unconscious or paralyzed.
let them do like one thing and they lose reactions and that and they can only if they can multi attack they only get one attack so it's still pretty bad but they still get to do something charm is an interesting one and one of the things that i've been replacing charm with for vampires and you can see this in the mcdm flee mortals vampires and also i have some other vampire stat blocks i've done elsewhere i really love to have a beguile option for vampires that's usually a bonus action for the vampire to do
that says they do a charm-style saving throw on a creature. And if the creature fails the save, the creature immediately takes their reaction to move and attack an ally of the vampire's choice. And then it's over. So they don't lose their turn. They're not permanently charmed. Instead, it's a bonus action.
It's a small miniature charm that's just enough to give that thematic flavor of a character turning against their allies without really taking a lot of agency away from the player because the player is back to being a normal character on their turn. It's only on that reaction where they fail that save that they move and attack. Now you're packing a lot of stuff into that reaction, right?
But it works really well. I like that. I like that one a bunch. And that's one that I've definitely used. Thomas C says, in a recent episode, you suggested two resources for kids or students who want to play D&D. These were the 2014 basic free rules and the 5.1 SRD. You said we could give either to students, but which would be better? How would you decide which version to give to which kids?
And even more generally, what is the difference? It's a good question. So the D&D 2014 basic, this is a little weird, right? The 2014 basic rules has only the core classes in it. So it's a smaller book. I think it's got the core four, the fighter, the rogue, the wizard, and the cleric. and it adds them up to 20th level, and it's got monsters and stuff in there, but it has fewer monsters.
But I feel like it's got better general instructions on what D&D is, but I've heard people argue otherwise. The system reference document, the 5.1 SRD, is actually not designed as a product to give to players. It's designed as a reference document for publishers to use to make things that are compatible with 5th edition. But it does have a lot of stuff in there that can help a GM play.
So it's still a pretty useful guide. And it has all of the classes with up to 20th level with one subclass each. I mean, I don't have a fantastic answer to this other than you can take a look through both and decide. Both are probably okay. I think if you have new kids that are playing, I'd probably start with the basic rules.
And now, of course, it's a different world, too, because now the D&D 2024 free rules are available on D&D Beyond. You can get them. You don't even have to make an account. You can go get the rules that way. I really hope they put them on a PDF.
And it could be that when the 5.2 SRD comes out, that that will be a better PDF that you can actually download and give to kids instead of, because there may not be a PDF of the free rules. So we'll have to see. I would, so the difference of intention is important, but really both of them are pretty usable for either of them. And they're both free.
So there's no reason that you can't kind of look through both, decide which one you think works best and offer both. I would download both and I would keep a handle on both because both are free. But I don't know that Wizards of the Coast is going to keep those up online forever. But the good news is they're in PDF so you can get them in PDF.
The 5.1 SRD will be around forever because there's a million copies of it now all over the Internet. And it's now converted to many different formats, including Markdown and including JSON and a bunch of other formats. So you can use it for all kinds of different things. But if you're looking for the more complete set, the 5.1 SRD probably has the complete set in there.
It just has one subclass each, but actually that's a pretty nice refined version of D&D. And we'll see. Now the Monster Manual is coming out very soon. Hopefully we see a 5.2 SRD that comes out not a lot, you know, and not a lot of time. That's the next big thing I'm looking for.
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