The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
D&D Beyond Removes D&D 2014 Material – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 26 Aug 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 02:30 D&D & RPG News: D&D Designers of All Editions Talk About and Play D&D 06:05 D&D & RPG News: Kelsey Dionne of Shadowdark on Morrus's Unofficial Tabletop RPG Podcast 07:04 Commentary: WOTC Removes 2014 Spells, Items, and Rules from the D&D Beyond Character Builder 28:06 DM Tip: Track the Characters 42:07 Patreon Question: Running Short Games for Large Groups 46:14 Patreon Question: Favorite D&D 2024 Rule? 48:47 Patreon Question: Running Mastermind and Dark Nemesis Bosses 51:49 Patreon Question: Releasing the Forge of Foes Generic Monster Stats into the CC 57:47 Patreon Question: What's In your DM - GM Kit? Links City of Arches Kickstarter! Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: D&D Designers of All Editions Talk About and Play D&D - Celebrating 50 Years of Dungeons & Dragons Kelsey Dionne on Morrus's Unofficial Tabletalk Podcast D&D Beyond Removes 2014 Spells, Items, Magic Items, and Rules from the Character Builder Further "Clarification" EN World Thread – How D&D Beyond Will Handle Access To 2014 Rules D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast, 5e, and You Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to take a look at the awesome Gen Con TV videos that have celebrated 50 years of D&D. Kelsey Dion is on Morris's unofficial Table Talk podcast. We're going to take a big look at the changes to D&D Beyond and how they are handling. the 2014 D&D information in D&D Beyond, what it means, what we can do about it, all that kind of stuff.
Today's big D&D tip is going to be what we should be tracking for characters. What kind of information should we be tracking? And when we talk about focusing on the characters of our game, what should we be focusing on? And we're going to cover more tips from the August 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. If you like the work that I do, please check out the City of Arches Kickstarter. The City of Arches Kickstarter is going on right now. It is for a high fantasy city sourcebook for your favorite fantasy role-playing game.
It's designed for Lazy Dungeon Masters, by Lazy Dungeon Masters, a high fantasy city sourcebook where you can take this city and drop it into your own campaign world or any published campaign setting and use it as a hub for all different kinds of adventures. It's built so that any species makes sense. Any kind of adventuring group together makes sense.
It's a really fun and happy city with lots of dark mysteries buried beneath it and around it and big plot lines. It's got one multiple first to 20th level campaign hooks in it. It's got starter adventures in it. It's got a starting scenario. It's got all kinds of stuff to help you run your games in it. There is a 42 page sample that you can download for free with no account whatsoever.
no login one click download this pdf check it out it's got an intro scenario to show you what the city is about plus a full adventure that you can run and a really good description a really good example of the kind of stuff you're going to find in the city of arches sourcebook i am super proud of this book i have been working on it for two years now and we are at the point where we're getting it all together and with your help we can get a really excellent print run of this book
And make sure to get it in the hands of as many people as possible. So if you've checked it out and you love it, please share it with your friends. Share it with your fellow game masters. Share it on your favorite social media sites. Let people know about it.
Tell them about the 42-page sample and show them the awesome stuff that they can get for the City of Arches in the City of Arches Kickstarter. Again, you can find the whole thing, the link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for passing along information about the City of Arches. Can't wait for this book to come out.
There was, my friend Teos Abadie showed me, brought up a really cool series of videos that Gen Con TV has been putting together. Gen Con TV is run by Peter Ackeson. He is the creator of, the owner of Wizards of the Coast before it was sold to Hasbro. He's... kind of there at the early days when they were building Magic the Gathering. And he was the person who bought Dungeons and Dragons from TSR.
And one of his new things is putting together this series of shows on Gen Con TV. But he put together a series of six shows. They're big, long ones, right? Five and a half, six hour long shows where they are playing through. This is as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of D&D. They're playing through every edition of D&D, 0E, 1E, 2E, 3E, 4E, and 5E.
And the players are all people who are involved in the creation of these games. So Wolfgang Bauer is there, Monty Cook is there, like all the people that have been making these games over the years, Jonathan Tweet for third edition, you know, tons of different people who have been involved in the creation of D&D over the past 50 years are there.
Now, the shows are really long, but most of those shows are them actually playing the game. If you want to watch them play their game, you can definitely watch it. But what I found really fascinating is about the first two hours of each of these shows is just a roundtable discussion of what it was like building them. The first one I started watching, I haven't even finished it yet.
I kind of like excited to finish it, is the third edition one. where Jonathan Tweet and Monty Cook and Sean Reynolds and others are talking about the creation of third edition. And this is one where Peter Atkinson, who was there, can talk about it as well because he was kind of there when they were building third edition.
So we are hearing it firsthand what it was like, what some of the ideas were, why they almost got rid of the gnome and then why they decided to keep it and how they came to a lot of the decisions that they came to and what's the stuff that has held up
throughout all of these editions i haven't even begun the fourth edition one yet but it's got like rob haynes so rob haynes so is a a friend of mine a mentor of mine and a fantastic designer is the designer behind 13th age along with jonathan tweet really fantastic dude he was the lead designer of dnd fourth edition and i think it'd be i can't wait to hear what he has to say i've listened to so every podcast he does i listen to because they're really really brilliant and
And he has such an interesting take that is not it's an opinionated take on RPGs that I think is fascinating. And I look forward to hearing what that is like. And then some of the creators of fifth edition in week six. So looks really interesting. The zero E week I'm almost done with.
And that's more of sort of like the history of it, because unfortunately, the people that were involved in the creation of OED and D are mostly have have have, you know.
gone to the end of the path they're no longer around but we do have john peterson talking about the history of it it's really fascinating to hear so if you really enjoyed that podcast series i recommended a few weeks ago called when we were wizards a really really awesome podcast series and you want to learn more about what how all of these editions of dnd got built and what was going on behind them i think you're going to find this list fascinating i think it's absolutely fascinating i think it is like
you know, this is a real treasure. Like you cannot get this anywhere else. Nobody else can do this. And you're never going to hear these people talk about all this stuff together again, I don't think. So it's an incredible series of videos. So I highly recommend it. You'll find a link to the playlists down in the show notes. Really, really awesome.
And you look at the views they've gotten, they're getting hardly any views, but God, they're so much better than most of the stuff you're going to find. So please check that out. The Celebrating 50 Years of Dungeons and Dragons, massive series of videos, just an absolute treasure.
I have only just started listening to it, but Kelsey Dion is on Morris's unofficial Table Talk podcast talking about Shadow Dark. Kelsey Dion is a fantastic creator of Shadow Dark, the four-time gold, any award-winning Shadow Dark game. Really, really awesome. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm sure it's going to be awesome, and I highly recommend it.
If you don't listen to Morris's unofficial Table Talk RPG talk, I really love this podcast. It is an excellent podcast. Morris has been in the industry for more than 20 years. He has fantastic. His co-hosts are absolutely fantastic. And it's really just a great time. And they have excellent guests. If I do say so myself, I was a guest on there a couple of weeks ago.
So I'm really looking forward to hearing Kelsey Dion talk about Shadow Dark and also have her weigh in on some of the news, like the things we're talking about, the whole thing that's been going on now that we're about to talk about. So really, really cool. So those are a couple of bits of media.
If you want to hear about other things going on in the worlds of RPGs, those are two sources that I would definitely that I definitely recommend. All right, today's big topic is the changes to D&D Beyond and how they're going to be handling 2024 D&D. The subtitle of this whole section is going to be I Told You So, but we're going to get into I Told You So because, yeah, it's going to be exciting.
So what are the changes? What's happening? Just in case you don't know, and there's all kinds of links in the show notes below, but they talked about it on the D&D Beyond site. They had a developer blog update on D&D Beyond that is linked there.
There is also a further clarification, which didn't change anything, just kind of further clarified, trying to, you know, this is the naked gun scene of him saying there's nothing to see here. Everything's fine while the fireworks thing is blowing up behind him. This is kind of the equivalent of what they are doing here.
And what I thought was really useful to kind of get my head around just all the different viewpoints of what's going on with this is a thread on ENworld. I spend a lot of time on ENworld these days. Ever since leaving X, I have gone and spent a lot more time over on ENworld. I really like it over there. And I always think that it's a good way to get a lot of different views.
And you're going to get a lot of different viewpoints, a lot of arguments that take place there. Generally, people are pretty civil, and you're going to get a lot of different takes. So what happened?
Basically, when they come out with the new 2024 books on D&D Beyond, the new core books, the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and DM's Guide, particularly the Player's Handbook is what we're really interested in here. You will still be able to build. I was very curious. What are they going to do with D&D Beyond when it comes to 2014 and 2024?
How are these things going to coexist inside the D&D Beyond character builder? I was curious about this. And they came up with an answer. And the answer is you are going to be able to build a 2014 character with a 2014 character class, a 2014 races and species subclasses, the old 2014 subclasses you'll have access to. However, the 2014 spells magic items.
non magic items and rule tool tips in the character builder will be replaced with the 2024 versions of those spells, magic items, other items and tool tips in the character builder. This is just in the character builder, the 2014 compendium, I either like when you want to look up the book itself and read the book itself, that will remain the same. All the old spells will be there.
All the old items will be there. All the old stuff will be there. Everything from in that 2014 compendium will be there. Um, And you will not have to buy the 2024 books in order to have these spells, which are replacing the 2014 ones. So, you know, it's not like you cannot have anything in your 2014 spells. The spells are going to be updated.
As I like to snarkily say, they'll happily overwrite your formerly paid content for free. So good on them. Thank you so much, Wizards of the Coast, for overwriting my previous content for free and not making me pay for the overwrites of my content.
But the reality is, the truth of the matter, the fact of the matter is, in short, you cannot play a pure 2014 D&D character using the character builder in D&D Beyond once these changes have taken place. The reality is, you're not... I'm going to say it again. you're not going to be able to build a pure 2014 character in the D&D character builder.
And when we talk about the idea of like, oh yeah, but the compendium is still the case. Nobody spent 30 bucks to have an HTML version of the player's handbook. They're spending their money in order to have it inside the character builder. The character builder in D&D Beyond is really the core functionality of that whole site. Yes, they have a bunch of DM tools. Yes, they have maps.
Yes, they're going to have the 3D VTT. But the real reason, I think if, you know, here's an easy way to tell. Would you buy D&D Beyond if it didn't have the character builder? And the answer is almost certainly no, you wouldn't. You want the character builder. The character builder is the killer app that it has.
So the fact that they're changing the functionality of the core function of D&D Beyond, I think, is a big deal. So how did this happen? It's the Darth Vader end user license agreement, right? The Darth Vader end user license agreement is I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further. I will further add to this though. I'm not going to listen to your prayers.
Of course, they're going to change it again. They're going to, they can alter the deal. They almost certainly will alter the deal again. We can be angry about this. You can be mad about this. You don't need my permission to be mad about things, but you don't need anyone's permission to be mad. And I don't think you're wrong to be mad. However, this should not be a surprise.
At least if you've been listening to me and my stuff, it should not be a surprise because it is a centralized service. And any centralized service that you're paying for, you're not buying anything. You're renting things. You're leasing things. And whoever's running the service, I guarantee you in their end user license agreement says, I am able to alter the deal.
Pray I do not alter it any further. That is how these deals work. When you're running any kind of centralized service, that's how it works. So then I hear lots of like discussions about this. And many of them are, oh, poor Wizards of the Coast doesn't have the budget in order to fix the D&D Beyond character builder so that they can do this or not. And it's so complicated.
And part of that is probably right, Almost certainly recall that D&D Beyond was bought out by two other companies previously. Who knows who's left? I wonder if anybody is left on the development team who actually was there when the thing was getting built many years ago. And recall, it was getting built many years ago. And when it was being built, it was built for one system, D&D 2014.
That was it. And it was built only for D&D supplements published by Wizards of the Coast. even though it wasn't owned by Wizards of the Coast at the time. That was what their focus on. In fact, when they tried to put another third-party product on there, Wizards almost sued them to get rid of it. They had to pull it out.
But now they're starting to include their third-party products in D&D Beyond and in the character builder and stuff like that. I am sure the code is a great big mess. I am sure that there's like people that like, oh my God, this is such a mess, but we have so many users. We can't really change it. This is a common problem. It's common with a lot of tools. It's common with like roll 20, right?
It's really hard to get people to shift. Once you've built a code base that like lots of people use, I'm sure it's hard. I also don't care. I don't care how hard it is for Wizards of the Coast. I care what it does to us. And I think every time we try to go like, oh, we need to put our heads in the poor developers and we have to really, you know, won't anybody think of their shareholders?
Like, we don't have to focus on helping Wizards with their business. They don't pay us to help them. We're not paid consultants to their business. So we only have to care about what matters to us. And the reality is, They're breaking the system. But here's the weird thing about like, well, you know, I'm sure it's really hard for them to filter the data is they are able to filter the data.
This is a surprise to me. When everyone else was arguing about this, I went and did some research over on D&D Beyond itself. One of the things I did is I saw that now there are check boxes to include third party stuff in the character builder or not. And I started a character up and I said, I do not want to have anything from Kobold Press in my character builder, particularly spells.
And I built out a wizard, I built him to 20th level, and I looked at what spells were available to me, and it was just core spells. It was not any spells from any other supplements. I then went back into that same character, went into the beginning of the editor page, and I said, now I do want to have Kobold Press spells.
And then I went back, and sure enough, the Kobold Press spells all showed up. So they have a way to filter spells. I just saw it. I saw them do it. How can you filter spells for Kobold Press, but you cannot filter your own spells? Doesn't make any sense to me. I am sure there's some technical thing.
I have heard many different conspiracy theories and I will probably hear these conspiracy theories in the comments of the YouTube video of Wizards is only doing this to try to get you to buy the new edition. I don't buy that either.
First of all, that's kind of this 4D chess argument that they have this like super sinister, super powerful, intricate plan on how they're trying to all get us to spend 30 more dollars. The reality is like every other corporation, they're a mess on the inside. Every corporation is a mess on the inside. They're walking around stepping on rakes all the time. And that's what's going on here.
It's not, you know, Hanlon's razor is in full effect. This is not a matter of some super secret conspiracy to get us to all be forced to buy a $30 book. I am sure there's some reason why this is harder than it seems, but I can't understand it. If you are able to filter out Kobold Press, I can't understand why you don't.
I'll also point out that when it comes to reviewing the stuff, particularly spells, I haven't looked at magic items, obviously, because they're not out yet. But when I looked at spells, I didn't really find a spell where I didn't like the newer one better. So that's something to consider is that you may say, hey, for me, it doesn't matter because the newer spells are better anyway.
But it is a mess if you're saying like, hey, I bought a 2014 version. I want to be able to play my 2014 version. And now I can't. And of course, I told you so. Back in December 18th in 2023, I wrote an article about D&D Beyond, Wizards of the Coast, and I was mostly talking about how everybody was saying, oh, isn't it a good thing that we're now going to have third-party products on D&D Beyond?
Isn't this so great for the community? And I was like, I don't think it's great for the community. I don't think it's necessarily great for the community. And I brought up why. And I was like, this is growing their walled garden. They're actually getting the thing that they wanted to get when they tried to remove the OGL, which is control. And did they get it? Yes, they're gaining control.
They're adding new stuff. And why does this matter? And I put a list of like, here are the problems if you are reliant upon D&D Beyond. If you're reliant upon D&D Beyond, and as I said, you're stuck with whatever options are available. You don't have access to nearly all the material. Players have the expectation that what's in Beyond is official and anything else is not.
This is the silvery barbs problem. You're stuck with whatever their version of 5e is, right? You don't get to play any of the other ones, but here's the big one. WotC can change material on D&D Beyond without notice and with no way to roll back to the previous versions. This is exactly what's happening. I said it nine months ago, and here we are. So I can't help myself but say, I told you so.
But I don't want to hang on to that. I know people are very upset about it. I'm making light of this, but people are clearly mad. And I think that's important. We need to take that anger and channel it. I'm getting back to my Darth Vader again, right? Channel, take the anger and do stuff with it. And the stuff we can do will actually make our games better. Now, there's other people.
If you're cool with the changes, if you're cool, and this sounds sarcastic, but it's not, if you're okay with them changing things under the hood on you and you still feel like it's a good deal, you're fine. Then this isn't a problem for you. If it's not a problem for you, then it's not a problem. I don't have to, I'm not making it a problem for you. If you're like, ah, whatever, I'll deal with it.
Fine, that's cool. Now, you can't say, oh, and I'm sure they'll never do it again. And we're going to get into that a little bit. I would still argue buying the physical book is a better deal. When you buy the physical book, they cannot change the physical book.
When you buy and run and use the physical book at your table with paper character sheets and everything like that, now you have full control over everything. They cannot go back and change it. Once you own the book, you can control everything. One of the questions we came up in Discord, this is a thought I had, which is, OK, how long have we been using D&D Beyond before they'd made these changes?
And some people it's like seven, eight years, but most probably most people about five or six years. And we said, like, how long do you expect they're going to have D&D 2024 on there and not change that? Right. We just saw them change the old one. do we have an expect? Oh, but they'll never change it from now on. No, of course they will. You just, you just saw it. You just saw them do it.
Of course they will. How long do we expect until they start changing that stuff? Four years, five years. Like generally what we expect was like three to five years on the average, like three to five years. Mostly it was like, are they going to put out another new edition? Oh no, that'd never do that. They'll probably, it'll be at least 10 years. Not necessarily.
If sales drop and people change and they say, no, we're definitely making a new version. And again, I really think that Wizards is super, super excited to try to turn D&D into a video game. They may make addition changes sooner in order to try to fit the idea of wanting to make D&D into a video game because they answer to their shareholders. Won't anybody think of the shareholders?
So, but let's say it's five years. You're going to pay about $400 over that five years. right? That the cost to share the books with your, with your players and the cost of the books themselves altogether. And cause it's like about $5 a month for five years, plus the cost of the books themselves, which is about $90. You're getting into about five, about 400 bucks.
Now that $400 may be still worth it to you, right? It sounds like a lot of money, $400 for D&D, but it's like, yeah, but you're also buying these books and able to share them with multiple groups. You can share them. I think we've figured out it was like 40 or 60 people you could share them with. It's a tremendous number of people you're able to share these books with for that $5 a month.
The answer might be that's totally reasonable. I know like I spend way more than $400. I spend way more than that per year. I almost spend that not quite per month, but it's pretty close, but My RPG budget is high. Now, of course, I'm running a company that is heavily focused on RPG stuff, so I have a bigger allowance than most, but I still spend a lot of money on RPG stuff.
And $400, that might be reasonable to you. It's not a trick question. If that's okay, then it's okay. Then you can do it. One other question is like, well, how many people does this actually affect? I did a couple of different polls on this over the years.
And I did a poll just recently on like how many people that are willing to answer my poll on YouTube don't send me email about it's not a representative sample. I know about representative samples. You don't have to teach me about representative samples. But I have done this in previous years. And the interesting thing is, so right now, I just did it a couple days ago.
I said, it's a poll for RPG game masters and players. Do you regularly use D&D Beyond? 36% said yes, 64% said no. That's pretty close to basically one in three. So about one out of three of the people who are following my channel answered this poll regularly use D&D Beyond. So it's not 90%. And that number is about the same.
It's actually actually a little bit lower than the same poll that I conducted about a year ago. Now I ran that same poll about three years ago, kind of in the middle of COVID. And it was like, it was almost half. So it's actually the percentage of the people that are using D&D Beyond regularly that have answered my polls has gone down.
This would be an indicator of, is it dangerous in the sense of it's becoming the gravity well for the hobby? And the argument that I would make is no, not really. So, you know, that's, that's one good consideration. My main lesson that I want to impart when I said, what are things we can do with this information? How do we take this anger and take this hatred and use it for something constructive?
Don't let D&D Beyond determine your happiness with 5e. Start to try to figure out ways to enjoy 5th edition, to enjoy D&D, to enjoy role-playing games in general. in ways that don't require your use of D&D Beyond because they can change the rules. You know, they've altered the deal. Pray they don't alter it any further. And they're going to alter it again, right? So you don't get to say that.
But, you know, trying out other systems, trying out running with paper. I'm running a level up advanced 5e game. There is no character builder for level up advanced 5e. So people are doing it in paper and it's kind of painful for them, right? My wife just actually converted over one sheet to another and took a bunch of her notes and organized them and stuff like that. It took her hours to do it.
It can be hard, right? Which kind of gets to a side question that I have, which is, are role-playing games getting too complicated in general? Is it getting so complicated that we need more tools like D&D Beyond in order to manage them?
I think the answer is no, and the reason why is because I looked up the 3.5 players handbook, and this is the skill list and the skill table for 3.5 published back in 2003. It's bananas how complicated things were in 3.5. You had incremental attack bonuses.
Oh, I get four attacks, but each one is minus five to each of the attack rolls, and I have half points that I can associate to various skills when I'm building my characters. It was bananas how difficult it was. To manage 3.5 characters. You need 3.5 characters. And yet still it was really popular and lots of people played it. It was really complicated and lots of people still played it.
So the answer is probably not. It's probably not that complicated. But I think it has gotten harder as we're more used to having digital tools and as we're more used to centralized tools that we become more reliant on things like D&D Beyond. But I think that's a problem. This problem is not unique to D&D Beyond. I get this argument. Oh, why do you talk about D&D Beyond? What about Roll20?
Yes, there's a problem with those two. All of these, D&D Beyond, Roll20, Shard, Alchemy, any of the online tools that are specifically online, where they're server-based tools, where you are subscribing, you're using your account... Any of those can change for lots of reasons. And those reasons may not be the same as like what we're seeing with D&D Beyond, but it certainly could.
Oh, it's really complicated for us to do things differently. Or we're burning our ships now that we've hit the shore. So we're going to get rid of the old one and force a new one down your throat. Or they
just go out of business right they run out of money and they can't keep up we saw this with alchemy last week where alchemy's relationship with free league meant that they had to pull all the pdfs down that they had available on alchemy so these kinds of changes can exist with any of the centralized service-based virtual tabletops or electronic tools and stuff like that
The good news is there are offline tools. Fantasy Grounds and Foundry in particular are offline tools. You can run them on your own. You can set up your own server. You can host those servers elsewhere. The material you download for them, you own. You have your copy. Foundry is actually really good at this. And this gets into my other thing. Here's my clickbait thing.
How to host your own version of D&D Beyond. can you host your own version of D&D Beyond? And the answer is yes, kind of. And the way you do it is Foundry. Foundry is a service that you can host yourself. I actually set one up yesterday. I set it up on the Forge called forge-vtt.com.
And I set up my own Foundry instance and I included a bunch of different rule systems that you wouldn't be able to get on other platforms necessarily, like 13th Age and like Shadow the Weird Wizard and like Level Up Advanced 5E and Kobo Press Black Flag and 5th Edition, D&D 5th Edition. And I was able to host all of those on this platform.
And there are some interesting tools like the Sheets Only plugin. There was another one that somebody just mentioned in Discord that was like a mobile-friendly plugin for Foundry that makes it easier for you to run them on mobile devices. I want to try that one out. There is a host. Foundry in particular is a hacker's dream.
It is a really great way to be able to build your own tools or use the tools developed by others. The creators of Foundry, they sell you a license once. You buy the software, you get the license, and you can use that license as long as that software is available to you, as long as you hold onto your copy. If they go out of business, you still have your copy of Foundry.
If the licenses get pulled for some of the content that they have, as long as you've downloaded your copy and backed it up, you still have it. And a lot of the people I've talked to who use Foundry are used to this ecosystem of we back up our systems, we use the instance that we want to use that has the game systems that we want in it.
And that is a way for you to essentially host your own version of D&D Beyond. It is certainly not as user-friendly as D&D Beyond. It is super not easy. That doesn't mean you can't do it. That is one option. But an easier option, one that is certainly less, requires less technical capability, doesn't require you to pay for a service that you have always up and running.
One way to do it is get used to paper character sheets again. I'm pushing this heavily. I think that our strength of our RPGs comes from the fact that we can use paper character sheets. This is not just grognard stuff. This is clearly a benefit right now. It doesn't matter. if they decide to change the 2024 stuff. It doesn't matter if they start swapping spells in and out on D&D Beyond.
If you are used to using paper character sheets, then it doesn't matter. The two thirds of those that I surveyed who aren't using D&D Beyond are unaffected by this whole issue that's going on. Why are they unaffected? How have they managed to hang on to their infrastructure? Are they playing different role playing games? Are they using different platforms? What are they doing? So that is a big one.
No one in this world can you trust, not men, not women, not beasts, but this you can trust. Holding up for those on the podcast, holding up a copy of the original player's handbook, the 2014 player's handbook. I made a meme, I'm 51 years old, and I made my own meme from Conan the Barbarian, from the beginning of Conan the Barbarian.
No one in this world can you trust, not men, not women, but this you can trust. It's your paper copy. But is that really true? Because that's true except for Morkborg, who posted on Twitter, if we ever release a second edition of Morkborg, we're coming to your home to destroy your first edition books. I thought that was pretty funny. That is a very Morkborg response to this whole situation.
That's how I feel about it. I think we all have lots of different feelings about it. The only thing that I would reinforce, the tips that I would try to push you is, A, do not let D&D Beyond determine your happiness with D&D or with 5th edition or with role-playing games. If you want to use it, that's great. If you find it useful, that's great.
If you're angry about this, that's okay, but take that anger and channel it into a constructive way that you can still love this hobby. You cannot trust D&D Beyond. You just cannot trust it to stay the way that it is. They can change anything at any time. That's true for other online services too.
If you find yourself completely wrapped around Roll20, you could be in trouble because they could change Roll20. Roll20 was kind of poking D&D Beyond in the eye saying, hey, we're still going to have the 2014 stuff with all of the spells on ours. For now. But an example of the kind of thing that could happen is somebody at Wizards could say, I'm really pissed off that they're saying this about us.
Let's pull their license. And now they can't do it anymore. And then you lose the stuff on Roll20 because you don't own your copy of Roll20. Roll20 is server-based. Take control over your own hobby. Don't let D&D Beyond dictate your happiness with D&D. Certainly don't let Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro and whatever business decisions they have to maximize shareholder value.
Don't let that determine your happiness with role-playing games. You get to determine your happiness with role-playing games. So for today's D&D tip, I want to talk about tracking information about the characters. Step one of the eight steps of Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master is review the characters. It's the very first thing we do.
And there's a reason why this is the very first thing we do when we're prepping our game if you're following the steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. And that's because nothing matters more. No NPCs matter. The story doesn't matter. Nothing matters as much to the players as their characters.
And the more we have those characters in our mind while we're doing our prep, the more our prep is going to focus down on the kinds of things that are going to matter to the characters. I fail at this often. I wrote the book on it. I preach it constantly. And I'm actually pretty bad about this. Not like an hour ago, before this show, I was doing my prep for my Shadow Dark game.
And I think people can remind me of this that are on here on Twitch. I'm pretty sure I reviewed the characters last. I didn't even remember all the characters because it's Shadow Dark and they die. And so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to them. But I did the review of the characters as the last step. And I don't think that's great.
Like I did that because it was like easier for me to still dive into all of the rest of the prep than it was for me to focus on the characters. That's one, unlike some of the other things where like I'm learning about my own process and it sort of changes my relationship with the eight steps. And in good ways, I don't think that's a good one.
I still firmly believe we should be paying attention to the characters. And it can bite you if you don't. And it did for me this past Wednesday. This past Wednesday, I ran a game. We had four of us. We were having a good time. Everything was going fine. We had the treasure come up and one of the characters got a piece of treasure.
And one of the other players remarked, he's like, that character is brand new and already got a new fancy magic item. And I've been here for like three months and I got nothing. And I was like, really? And he's like, yeah, everything has been a melee weapon. I'm a ranged attacker. I got nothing. I've got no cool magic items whatsoever.
And one of the other players is like, you can have this rapier that casts like a crazy glass shard attack. And he's like, fine, I'll take the rapier that does the glass shard attack. So he got a hand-me-down from one of the other characters. And the reality is I just hadn't been paying attention, right? So I roll loot randomly and I pick out loot.
And a lot of it has been melee weapons because you're a lot more likely in my random table to roll a melee weapon than you are to roll a ranged weapon. So he just didn't get one. Now he's also like by far doing, I think twice the damage of anybody else in the game.
So I'm not too worried about the fact that he doesn't have a magic item, but he should have some kind of fun magic item, even if it's not like a fancy bow that makes his, you know, now he's doing even 2.3 times more damage. He could get something else. He could get like a special suit of armor that lets him cast Misty Step. I bet he'd love that.
So he can zip around the battlefield and do stuff like skirmishery kind of things. Boots of Speed. You know, there's all those kinds of like cool Baldur's Gate 3 sort of magic items. I should have been paying better attention to this, right? I should have looked and said, oh man, I don't think that character has gotten a magic item in a while or ever, right? During this entire campaign.
Maybe I should do that. So we're going to talk about this problem today because what are the things we should be paying attention to when we review the characters? First, do it. When you're sitting down to do your notes, even if you're bored, you're at work, you're stuck in a meeting, think about your characters. Write down their names and just think about where they are currently in the session.
Think about what's going on with them. Write some of this stuff down. This is something you can do anywhere. You can do it while you're taking a walk. You can do it while you're stuck in traffic. You can do it while you're at a doctor's office waiting for an appointment. You can do it at any point where you just have some imagination time.
Sit down, think of the list of your characters, walk through them, remember their names, see if you can remember their names, put those names in your mind, and then ask yourself some of these other questions about reviewing the characters. We don't have to just do it during our prep. We can do it any time we want.
But if you find your mind wandering to your game, you could do worse by having your mind, by kind of moving your mind's wandering to the characters, who they are, what they want, what they have, what they like to do. What are the specific things that we can be paying attention to when we look at our characters? So a key is what's important to the players is what should be important to us.
The characters are the player's interface to the game. That is their way of interacting with the game is through their characters. So the things that matter to their characters are the kinds of things we should be paying attention to.
If a player is telling you, hey, I have this NPC that I'm connected to, and I think it would be really fun to have more time with that NPC, or they just mention it a lot. They say, oh yeah, no, I live upstairs in the apothecary place. Write that down. Write it down. Ask them, oh, who runs the apothecary place? What's your relationship with them? Write that down too.
Take some notes about this stuff, right? I think however you manage your notes for your game, have a section about the characters and have each of the characters there and just jot down notes. They can be disorganized. They don't have to be big. And you don't have to paste in three pages worth of stuff. A little couple of lines will do.
In your notes, take notes of the kinds of things that are important to the players. When they mention it to you, write it down. Put that stuff down. And remember, what's important to the players is what should be important to you. What are they paying attention to when it comes to their characters?
Now, there are other things that they may not be paying attention to that you might want to jot down as well. We're going to talk about some of these. So what are the basics of the things that you should jot down? Obviously, having a list of what their species is. What's their ancestry? What's their background? What's some information about the character? Where did they come from?
What are just a little bit of the history? You don't need much. Three or four words will do it. You don't really need a giant paragraph. If they give you a huge amount of backstory, summarize that backstory, just jot it down into some of the names of the people that they were involved with and what was the relationship of those names. You don't need a ton of backstory.
and you don't need to record a ton of backstory for it. There's some little mechanical-y bits that it can be handy to keep track of, like their passive scores. What skills did they bother to be proficient in?
This is one I don't think we pay a lot of attention to, but when a player makes a decision to have proficiency in certain things and certain skills and stuff like that, write those proficiencies down. Because that's the kind of thing they want to see more of.
So then when you're going through your notes, and ideally, if you could keep it in front of you during the game, you can recall, oh, yeah, they trained in Arcana. Well, I'm going to throw more Arcana stuff or they're trained in animal handling. Let me give them a chance to do something with animal handling.
They're telling you what they're interested in when they choose things like what skills they're proficient in. So jot that stuff down. Background hooks. What are some of the hooks from their background story that you think you might be able to do something with in the future? What are some of the things you think you might be able to drive into the rest of the game?
One of my favorite tricks is when I'm sitting down to do secrets and clues is I will try to generate one secret for every character. What is one thing that a particular character might learn that's about their backstory or about their heritage or about something about that character? What is a secret that I can include
where I don't have to identify how they discover it, but I know it's about them. That's a really easy way to like, if you're having trouble coming up with 10 secrets and clues, make six of them, four to six of them about the players, about the characters and what they've got going on. That's something I really like. Then mechanic-y, more mechanic-y bits.
What are some of the class features they picked up when they leveled up? What are some of the things that they picked up when they leveled up? What are some of the spells they took?
One of the things I really like to do, this is something I've only started doing recently, but I really think it's beneficial, is when the characters level up, I mark it in my notes that during the session, we're going to talk about what they got. So again, my Wednesday group just leveled up to fifth level. And fifth, this is a level up advanced 5e game.
And a level up advanced 5e game, you get a ton of stuff at fifth level. So it's worth the time. It could take a half hour for all of us to go through and talk about what the characters gained. And I'm going to be writing that stuff down. I want to know what they got because I want to use those as potential hooks and interesting things that we can drive into the game. So they made choices.
Again, they pick things for their characters. So why don't we take that opportunity to write down the stuff that they picked for their character so that we know that we can use that when we're thinking about our game. So class features are a big one and leveling up spells, new abilities, new feats, you know, new features.
Sometimes they'll just be like, oh, all I really did, I took a dexterity bump and I got some extra hit points. Like, okay, write it down anyway, right? You know, like, oh, they got their dex went up. So you could say like, oh yeah, before you don't think you'd have made that grab, but because you increased your dexterity, you were able to grab the thing before it fell off a cliff. Right.
Stuff like that. Lightning rods. Lightning rods are a thing that I really kind of not. I'm sure it's not unique to me. This is but my kind of labeling and sort of focusing on this idea is something that I came up with like in the last couple of years. We talked about it in Forge of Foes. I think I don't remember if I described in Lazy DM's Companion or not.
The idea of lightning rods is instead of trying to build monsters that are resistant to the powerful effects of the characters, you instead include monsters specifically designed to be affected by that stuff. The example is the 20 orcs that are running in in a perfect 20 foot diameter fighting circle. And you're like, is that so I can fireball them? Yes. Right.
This is so you can or 20 foot radius. Right. There's a 40 foot diameter, 20 foot radius circle of orcs charging in at you. Oh, fireball. Yeah. Right. Like like set up monsters to be fireballed. Take opportunity attacks. Put in huge monsters with terrible charisma saves that do tons of damage if they don't control them with something like banishment or polymorph.
Have them put in ways so that the characters who want an opportunity to do some battlefield control have that opportunity. There's a Snack Daniels in a Twitch chat says, shoot your monks. Whenever you've got a bunch of archers and a monk, make sure to shoot arrows at that monk. Because they love to see those abilities, right?
Try to find ways, now that you know what the mechanical abilities are of the characters, put things in the battles and write them down. So here's that trick when we're talking about that focus on the characters is you don't have to just do it during the prep of another part of the game. You can write it down. You say, oh, this character's got polymorph.
And in your notes say, add big brutes with terrible charisma scores or add lots of minions to be destroyed or add undead to be smote.
you know like you can write down the kinds of encounters that those characters are going to be really good at or what to avoid one of my players is has a lot of stuff with poison there's a lot of stuff with poison and level up advanced 5e and he can be mad right when it's like oh we fight undead all the time and undead are always immune to poison so maybe make sure you put some other creatures in there that are not immune to poison so that he can use his poison abilities right what are the things that you can include or or avoid so that people don't their their ability is completely negated
So lightning rods is a really powerful feature to make your players happier and still make the game more fun and exciting because sometimes they might not get control over this. An example of a lightning rod, I've definitely used lightning rods in loss of circumstances, but one of the ones that comes to me is when the characters were fighting the Frostmaiden or all the Frostmaiden in...
The adventure Rime of the Frostmaiden. My players were facing one of the iterations of the Frostmaiden herself, and she has legendary resistances and everything else. And we had players who had spells like Banish, and I had her rock attack him. A rock is a really good example. ROC. This is the giant eagle that eats people. rocks have like 280 hit points. They're really powerful.
When they hit you, they do like 60 damage. They do crazy amounts of damage when they hit you. You really do not want to be hit by a rock. Their attack bonus is really high. They could grab you and throw you. They can do all kinds of terrible things. They also have terrible charisma saves.
which means there's a great monster to banish and control and i remember in that battle it was like they knew it they're like we've got to banish it and then they cast it and it would make it saving throw like oh my god we got to try again like we can't let that thing eat us it'll we will wipe out if we don't control that thing so it's almost like a little puzzle right they've got this element to the battle that they like they better not only is there a monster in there that is designed for them to control if they don't control it the battle's going to be a lot harder and
is an interesting part of how this whole thing works. Maybe you hit it with a hypnotic pattern instead of a banish. Anything we can do to try to stop that thing from hitting us, because we really need to, because if it hits us, we're going to go down. That is something else. And of course, as I kind of started this whole segment, write down their magic items.
When the characters pick up magic items, write them down in the list. And that way you can look and say, who didn't get one? I wish I had done this. I do not want my players to be sad that they didn't get a magic item or mad that they didn't get a magic item when everybody else did.
When my wife went through the list of everybody they had, she goes, wow, one player has like four magic items and one has almost none, right? And it's because I haven't been paying attention to it. I hadn't been marking it down. I hadn't been looking at it. I hadn't, you know, this is... This is an experience that I am sharing. This is not preaching.
I failed at this and I wish I hadn't because it would have been a lot cooler if that player was like super excited to use a magic item that they picked up a couple of sessions ago than they were to be like, wow, everyone else is getting a magic item, including the guy that just showed up, just got a magic item and I didn't get anything. Like that's not where I want my game to be going.
So write down magic items. All of this is to say, again, the characters are the most important component of the games that we're running and we should spend our time. I want to do a better job focusing my attention on the characters. Hopefully you got some tricks for doing that here.
Hopefully there are ways that we can make it fun for us to kind of keep an eye on what the characters are doing, what they've picked up, what they specialized in. No real special note taking techniques here. Just write it down, write down the name of the character, write down the stuff that they've got and review it at the beginning of every one of your prep sessions.
Write down information about the characters, write down stuff about their mechanics, write stuff about their characters, backgrounds and stuff like that. Write about their story, write down secrets and clues, write about their magic items. Keep that in front of you. Take a look at it every time that you're going to prep your game.
And I think you and your players are going to have a lot more fun at your table. Every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the monthly Q&A. Any patron of Sly Flourish can ask any RPG related question. I answer every one of those questions every Friday morning. Some of those questions I bring here to the show where we dive in a little bit deeper.
Today, Topher M says, Mike, do you have any particular tips for running games with lots of players? I run a tween D&D club at my local library, and we average about 10 kids a session. Plus, we only have an hour. It can be difficult to get around the table enough that every kid feels like they got a shot.
I've already scrapped initiative order in favor of simply going around the table, but I'm always looking for more ways to make it go faster.
thanks so that's actually two questions but this came up again and i know i've talked about this in previous shows but when i dug through my old talk show database and i my patreon q a database i really couldn't find stuff so i wanted to bring this question up again so hopefully i can use this answer when other people but we're really talking about two different things one is how do you run a game with when you have too many players and two is how do you run short session games how do you kind of set things up for games with very short sessions like one hour
The first thing I would recommend, and none of these are going to be perfect answers, and they may be hard. They may even be impossible for the situation that you're in. But really, I think they need to be said. Ten is too many players in a game. Five is way better. Four is fine. So is there a way for you to split the groups up?
Is there somebody you think, of the groups of kids that are there, is there a kid that you think would be good to have the responsibility of running the other game? Or... Even better, could you find two kids and then have each of them run their games and you kind of go back and forth and help them run their games rather than trying to run one game for everybody?
Is there a way to kind of split that up? Kids have been starting D&D games for 50 years. People have been playing when they're very young. People have been DMing when they're very young. So what are ways that we can help kids begin to GM these games with our direct assistance because we're there? So I would at least try something like that.
Then the idea of having a one-hour game is a different problem. And the real answer there is how do you focus the sessions down to basically like one encounter? If you're running a one-hour game, you're really going to have one scene. And how do you include all of the aspects of a good D&D game in that one scene? How do you include elements of role-playing?
How do you include elements of exploration? And how do you include elements of combat? And there are ways to do that, but you really want to say like, okay, I want to build one scene in one situation where That's going to kind of include or may include all of those things in it. Maybe they don't include every one of them every time.
And sit down and write a bunch of those scenarios and keep them as like one scene scenarios. One thing happens. Deborah Ann Wohl had a video on the podcast for Jon Bernthal where in the middle of the conversation, she started a D&D game, right? She just said, here's the situation. You are this character. Here's this thing you do. The video has been skyrocketing around the internet.
Every show I know has been talking about how awesome it is. And it is really, really awesome to watch. It's a fantastic video. I will link it. One of the things that's interesting about that video, though, is how you can boil down D&D to its absolute bare minimum.
And I think one of the things we can do is instead of building like entire one hour adventures, is that we can break them into like one hour sessions, one hour scenes. And that scene could be you're walking in the woods and an owlbear comes out through the woods and it's got an arrow sticking out of its back. and you hear the sound of goblins nearby, what do you do? Right?
How can you set up a situation where it's a little bit more complicated than just an encounter with some goblins or an encounter with an owlbear? And one thing you could do, for example, is each of those one-hour events could be you roll two encounters, you mash them together, and you create a scenario. If you're creating those scenarios ahead of time, that could be one way to do it.
If you want to do something a little bit more where there's a little bit more consistency from game to game, you could do like a dungeon crawl where every room has one of those scenes in it, or maybe every couple of rooms has a scene in it. Like how much can you get through?
You're probably not going to get through more than like one or two rooms on the assumption there's anything interesting in those rooms, but you could have like a tiny dungeon crawl. where they have sort of all of the elements of D&D sort of encapsulated in each room. That's one way that I would probably want to run our game. So for that situation, those would be my answer.
One, see what you can do to split the groups up, and maybe you act as sort of a mediator between the two groups, helping the players that you decide where they can run the game, and really build scenarios, small, short scenarios that can all be played out in an hour, whether it's dungeon crawling or whether it's walking around.
Great Diviner Game says, what is one rule that excites you about the new D&D 2024 rules update? I actually have a whole bunch of them, and I don't know that I could rank them. But I'll pick one big one, which is I will go with surprise. When we take a really complicated situation and we make it much simpler, I'm usually much happier.
And the idea that surprise essentially grants the surprised characters disadvantage on their initiative is super easy to manage.
right it it's way better than the surprise was in 5e it's one of those things where you you could just immediately grab it and throw it in your game without ever having to hear anything else surprised characters roll initiative with disadvantage is really great really great if you're using static disadvantages just subtract five from the whatever their initiative score is i use static initiative for mine usually at 12 but if they surprise them yeah now it's a five right now it's seven
So I really like that. I love when things get simplified down and, you know, I can't help myself, but have more than one rule from D&D 2024 that I really like. I really like the exhaustion rules too. I remember when they were doing the play test and exhaustion came out and it was minus one to any D20 check. And if you hit a certain range, you died. And I was like, oh, that's so great.
It's so much better than the table of crazy exhaustion stuff that existed before. And then they stopped talking about it. I was so mad. I'm like, oh, no. Like, why did they, it was so elegant. Why did they, why did they get rid of that? We liked it so much. And then it came out and it turned out it's actually very close to that. It's minus two on DC checks.
Minus two on D20 checks instead of minus one. But that's still really easy. I can remember it. I don't have to look up a table. We could probably use it for other things. I know that there's a general idea that exhaustion should never be an infliction of a monster. But boy, vampires that do exhaustion sound pretty cool. I kind of like it, right? I kind of like that idea. Yeah.
So I really like the exhaustion rules as well. And then there's lots of little things that I like, mostly in the spell side. I love how they've changed many of the spells. All the conjure spells.
I've definitely had people who are angry about the fact that the conjure spells now don't have near the versatility that they had before because you could use those wolves that you summoned for other things. The idea of conjuring a woodland being and letting it do other things other than being a giant ball of damage.
was nice on the other hand being a giant ball of damage is mostly how people wanted to use them in the first place and now it's way easier to use those conjure spells so i actually really like the conjure spells there's lots of little elements here and there all throughout the book that i really really like so but those are just just that was just a couple of the ones that really stand out to me
Craig P., you ever ran a game where the player characters are being hunted by some powerful dark nemesis? Love your take on how to use that as a tool to create some anxiety among the group. Create a powerful narrative with a big bad, especially if the nemesis has the ability to take the form of anyone.
So to me, the number one tip I have for running a recurring villain is don't let the characters face the villain until they're ready to kill it. Until they're ready to kill the villain. Because they're going to attack it. And I think it's, to me, facing a villain who you know is already set up to completely kick their ass, I'm not a fan of. I don't really like that idea. Yeah.
because it's you're railroading the situation you know fighting an undefeatable foe i think is a terrible terrible story element and i would avoid it but that means if you throw the villain in front of your characters they could kill it right away and then it's not a powerful villain now maybe that's okay because you have as many villains as you want you can just keep making up more villains if you want they could be more powerful any way that you want
So lots of different ways that you could do that if they do kill a villain. But I think far better is the foreshadowing of the villain, the villain that's not there. And you could do this with heralds, heralds who talk to the characters about the villains, news that they could learn out, situations where they find the remnants of the villain, stories that they hear about the villain.
You can really build up a villain's whole story.
you know persona and scare the players about like who is this guy and have them thwart the players sometimes the players get to a place and it turns out the magic item is already taken because the villains guys already got there first lots of ways that you can do that and and and have that and that idea of like the nemesis who is taking the shape of anyone i actually have a villain in my a5e game right now who is exactly that and the players actually saw him and didn't realize it was him
And, but I didn't, I didn't, I, you know, I foreshadowed that this guy was a villain, but I didn't set it up that like they were going to have to face him and fight him. They just ran into him at a party. Right. And he insulted one of the characters and then left because he's not interested in starting a big fight there. But I was like, it was kind of fun to have him there.
And this guy is a shapeshifter type. He can, he can shift his form. So yeah. But the main one is don't put him in front of there and instead foreshadow, foreshadow, foreshadow. Now the hard part, the hard part is you don't want the villain to just fall over dead in round one when they fight it.
So when you're going to have your villain finally show up in a big fight, be prepared with all of your dials to make that villain really powerful and really scary and really dangerous.
That's a whole other topic about how do you make sure that when you're facing boss monsters that the boss monster is really going to be a threat, particularly when the characters have tons of different capabilities to do things like that. What are all the ways you can protect your villain so that they can match up the threat that you have been building up in the story that whole time?
Now, maybe it's actually fun when they don't, when they've been facing this villain for all this time and then they face him and the villain's actually a total pushover. That can be kind of funny. So that's always not so bad either, right? But a lot of times you're going to want a villain that's actually as strong as the reputation that they've built up.
And then that's a real trick for you to make sure that when they face that villain that they actually are going to get a good fight out of it. Dan L says, the general use stat blocks in Forge of Foes are alone the worth the price of admission. I use them all the time and they've saved me a ton of prep work. Are there still plans to release these in the Creative Commons?
If not, how do you feel about creators using the format to create new general purpose stat blocks for commercial works? I do not have plans to release those in the Creative Commons. Because they already are. Ha, they're in the Creative Commons. They've been in the Creative Commons now for a while.
We have, if you go to Sly Flourish, and you will find a link in the show notes, go to slyflourish.com and down there we have Lazy GM resource documents. And there are two of them, the Lazy GM's resource document and the Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder resource document. This second one is built from Forge of Foes.
It is the material that we had promised that we would release under a Creative Commons license. And we did so. And it's a single HTML document.
You can actually find a GitHub repo where we have it available in HTML and EPUB and Markdown and PDF and other formats and broken out into individual pieces, including those things that you described of the general use stat blocks and the general use stat blocks. general use combat stat blocks, are here in the Creative Commons. We have a minion, a CR1-8 minion.
We have a soldier, CR1 half-soldier, a brute, CR2, a specialist, CR4, a myrmidon, CR7, a sentinel, CR11, and a champion, CR15. Hey, look, and a whole section on lightning rods. And this whole section on lightning rods is also given out under a Creative Commons license.
So yes, these general use stat blocks are intended that you could just kind of, this is the sort of slightly more complicated version of just use a bear. If you've ever heard this like old school rule that has been around for 50 years, it's like when you don't have a stat block for something and you're looking to put a monster in there, just use the bear stat block.
The bear stat block is a nice, straightforward, generic stat block that you can use for lots of many things. However, the bear doesn't always scale perfectly to the kind of monster that you're thinking of. So we said, instead of a bear, let's have like a handful of bears, right? Everything from CR 1.8 to CR 14.
And the idea here is like you can use the table and kind of build your own monster, or you could just grab one of these and off you go. They have a basic attack. They have some basic stats. You can move the stats around. So, for example, if let's go for one of the specialists, for example.
right and we have it the stat block represents spies assassins hunters and trained elite forces the specialist serves as a boss for fourth level characters an elite opponent for two fifth level characters or a one-on-one combatant for 10th level characters or in large groups against 16th level characters i actually think that the cr4 is really really good
and the cr4 for example has like a dex of 18 but you could actually say oh if it's a spell caster it's not a dex of 18 it's an intelligence of 18 or if it's a warlock it's a charisma of 18. so you just move those stats to whatever one you think is appropriate right and same with like the saving throws you can move them around uh generally you almost barely need to right a lot of time you can just use the stat block and in your head you can change a lot of these things specialist makes two attacks plus six to hit for each attack 14 damage per attack 3d6 plus four
So nice generic stat block that you can include. I actually have a printout of these in my binder that I bring with me when I'm running games in fifth edition. I have a set of these monster stat blocks from CR, like one fourth of CR, whatever. And that way I can just circle that stat block.
The one thing I would say is you probably want to add one special feature to any one of these monsters, just something to give it a bit of flavor, a bit of mechanical flavor that shows what it does that's different. Of course, Forge of Foes has all kinds of different sort of powers, monster powers that you can associate with all of these. So you can find that in Forge of Foes.
Often you can also come up with your own on the fly. Sometimes all you need is flavor. Sometimes you're like, he's throwing necrotic bolts or he throws like the equivalent of a necrotic fireball. You can sort of like change these things around and say, ah,
Instead of it being two different attacks for 14, I'm going to do a single 28 point blast with a DC of 14 because the armor class and DC can be basically the same thing. So that way you can sort of quickly convert on the fly different sort of abilities for monsters by using these general purpose stat blocks.
But I presume I had, I had mentioned when this first came out, this has now been out since the beginning of this year. And, but the fact that you didn't know that is here means I want to talk about it again. So here you can find it again. It's in the, I will link to it directly in the show notes, but you can find it off of slash flourish.com. And it's got piles of stuff.
We put out, we put out lots and lots of material from including the full monster statistics by challenge rating list is in here. So every challenge rating from CR 0 to CR 30 is in here, along with what kind of monsters represent those challenge ratings, amount of damage you do, everything else. And from our current look, this looks like it's still going to work fine with 2024 D&D.
We're going to have to see when the Monster Manual comes out, but I don't think you're going to have to change it too much to work with D&D 2024. I don't think you actually need to change it at all. And then lots of different advice for how to how to handle it.
So we put tons of stuff in the Creative Commons with the desire to help people use it in their own commercial works so that we can we want we wanted to take a lot of the work that we had done for Forge of Foes work that was funded through the Kickstarter and release it to other people to release it to the community overall so that it could be used in lots of ways so that can live beyond us.
So like all the different like monster roles are in here. We have bosses and minions. Descriptions of bosses and minions are in here. Combat encounter checklist. What are the kinds of things you want for big combat encounters? Of course, the hard challenges. What are monster combinations for hard challenges we have in here, along with great big lists of them for all of them.
So lots of encounter building things. Lazy encounter benchmark is in here. How to tune the benchmark is in here. Monsters by adventure location is in here. We have tons of stuff. that is available. Monsters and the Tiers of Play. Lots of material. It is not everything that's in Forge of Foes.
Forge of Foes is still a fantastic book with lots and lots of material that helps you build monsters and lots of advice for how to run monsters in games. But we wanted to take some of the core mechanically bits that we thought would be a big benefit to the community and put it in the Lazy GM's fifth edition monster builder resource document available in the Creative Commons.
Brandon C says, I was suggested your two DM kit videos and I like them since I've been trying to cut down on what I carry since I normally run games in other places. I'd love to know or see if there are items or tools that have updated, replaced, or added since the last one. I shot this video. So you are not the only one who asked me this. Other people asked me this too. And I said, you know what?
I want to shoot that video. And I did. So I shot this video where I went over my current GM kit including going through my crazy binder that I've now started using. I think it's really fun to do these. This is my fourth video and actually my very first video that I published on the site back in 2013. was the original lazy DM kit. And this video has 350,000 views.
It's a crazy number of views that are on here. And I have long since changed the things that I carry in here. Another fun thing about this is if you watch the video, mute it so the audio, if you look, see that little purple blob that's sitting there? Oh no, it's right over here. Look over on the right-hand side. There's this little moving purple blob.
on the camera that was actually a flaw in my iphone camera that i had back in 2013 when i shot this video and there are probably a hundred different comments saying hey purple blob in your video so you don't need to tell me about the purple bob of the video i'm well aware of it it's been it's been 11 years since i shot this video i'm well aware of the purple bob
But it's kind of fun that I've done this kind of video now multiple times. There are four such videos. All of those videos are linked in the most recent one. So if you want to see how the kit has changed over the years, I have 2013, 2018, and 2021 were the other times that I have built my kit out. And my kit has changed significantly over that time.
I wouldn't say like the old one sucks and now the new one's better. You know, just different times, different focuses, different changes on that. So that was a new video that I put up. You can find a link to that video in the show notes. Really fun to do. And it was done specifically because you asked for it and other folks asked for it as well.
Friends, I want to thank you all today for hanging out with me while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games. If you enjoyed this show, again, you can help me out by checking out the City of Arches Kickstarter. It is live right now on Kickstarter. You can find a link in the show notes. If you have not backed it yet, please consider backing it.
You're not going to be disappointed with this book. If you have backed it, please tell your friends, share it on social media, tell people about it, help get the word out so that we can get a bigger print run for this book and get it out into the hands of more people for years to come. Thank you all so much. Have a great day and get out there and play a role playing game.