The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Kobold Press Encounter Builder – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 07 Oct 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:20 Sly Flourish News: Sly Flourish After-School RPG Club Sponsorship 07:44 D&D & RPG News: Free Kobold Press Encounter Builder 11:11 D&D & RPG News: Dread Thingonomicon Bundle of Holding for $8 13:52 D&D & RPG News: Goodman Games Humble Bundle 16:04 Kickstarter Spotlight: Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter 19:15 D&D & RPG News: Ars Magica in a Creative Commons License 26:33 DM Tip: Two Bandits Talking About the Characters 31:28 Patreon Question: Single Best Tip for New GMs 38:24 Patreon Question: What If Characters Don't Strike Lighting Rods? 44:12 Patreon Question: D&D 2024 Tool DCs and DM Agency 50:18 Patreon Question: Can You Mix TOV, A5e, D&D 2024, and D&D 2014? Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Sly Flourish After-School RPG Sponsorship Kobold Press Encounter Builder Dread Thingonomicon Goodman Games humble bundle Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter Ars Magica Rules and Setting under CC BY SA Top Tips for RPG Game Masters Lightning Rods
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to talk about the Sly Flourish after-school sponsorship that we ran this past week. We're going to look at the Kobold Press Encounter Builder that just went online. Dread Thingonomicon is currently a bundle of holding for a ridiculously low price. Goodman Games has a Humble Bundle with a ton of 5e material you can get for very little.
We're going to look at the Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter by Ghostfire Gaming. Ars Magica's Rules and Setting are going to be released under a Creative Commons license. We're going to talk about that. Today's tip is going to be having two bandits talking about the characters.
How can you add in two bandits into your game that talk about the characters and what value that that can provide for your game and your players and for you? And we're going to cover the remaining questions from the September 2024 Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games.
This show, like all of the work of Sly Flourish, is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of awesome stuff, tips, tricks, tools, adventures, campaign source books, online tools to help you run your RPGs. You also get access to the incredible Lazy DM community over on Discord, and you help me put on shows like this.
And there's something else that you do that we're going to talk about here in a minute. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. On, not necessarily every year, but every year that we are able to, my wife and I run a small sponsorship for after-school tabletop role-playing game programs.
And this is really due to the excellent support that we get, both from people who buy our books and back our Kickstarters, and particularly to the patrons of Sly Flourish who give us money every month. We like to take what we get and give that back. And so what we do is we put together a after school tabletop RPG sponsorship.
This year we're able to give about $12,000 worth of money and products to different programs out there for people who are running school programs. Unfortunately, by the time you're hearing this, we almost certainly have all of the people that we're able to give grants to this year. But there's other things that we can give to you if you are still running a program.
And the best way, if you want to know like, oh, wow, I'm just hearing about it now and I didn't hear about it before. The best way to find out about this program is to subscribe to this Life Flourish newsletter. When you subscribe next year, we're going to send out a newsletter that says, hey, the program is now open.
This year, we sent it through patrons, thinking that we'd get a few people from patrons first and then send out a newsletter. It turned out that just through our patrons, we had enough people that got the sponsorship. So next year, we're going to be doing it through the newsletter. So what we send out to each of the groups, we send out $200 through PayPal.
that people can use to buy whatever stuff they need in order to run their after-school RPG program. And we also give access to some digital tools. So we're able to, again, because of the fantastic support that we get from patrons of Sly Flourish and from those of you who buy our books and those of you who back our Kickstarters and things like that, we like to give back.
And this year we were able to give back about $12,000 worth of money and worth of actual direct funding and links to products that we are giving out to schools so that they can use them. But there's other things that we can offer here, too. And again, unfortunately, I always talk about like, oh, it'd be great to talk about the show and we'll get people.
And then by the time the program is popular enough and successful enough that almost all of the our ability to give that out is gone by the time I'm actually able to talk about it. But there's another group that is helping out, too.
So as part of this, somebody reached out to us and said, hey, we run a program, an actual 501 3C called Let's Quest, which is a 501 3C dedicated to giving RPG materials and funding to different after school or school or library tabletop role playing game programs. You can find a link to Let's Quest. It's called Let's Quest After School dot org in the show notes. If you are interested
excited about giving back to the community if you want to give back to programs like this we have had one i think one person but i've definitely gotten other people say hey it's great that you're doing this and we'd like to give you money to give more to the program and we're like that's a real we don't know how to handle that so there's not a good way for us to handle that
But if you want to give money to a program that can get it into the hands of schools and groups that are running these after school programs at libraries and things like that, please take a look at the Let's Quest. You can contact them about it. You can take a look at their documentation. They are a legitimate 5013C.
They talk about what kind of money comes in and where that money gets distributed. They don't take any salaries themselves. So the money that you're putting in, every dollar goes to schools that are there. I haven't worked with them before. I haven't talked to any of the groups that they have supported. So I only heard about them yesterday, but I plan to learn more about them.
But I wanted to offer that up as well. So that's the Let's Quest. You can find a link to that in the show notes. But also we have a bunch of other resources available to different school groups. Wizards of the Coast, of course, has their educator resource section. You can get things like access to D&D Beyond. You can get a classroom curriculum, an afterschool club kit.
Educator licenses for D&D Beyond, ways to promote your club and things like that. So there's a whole page. Again, you can find this link and we will also have it on our slideflourish.com slash sponsorships. You will find links to all of these different things that educators can use.
There is, of course, the D&D 2014 basic rules, 180 page document available for free that gives you all of the rules you need in order to play the 2014 version of D&D. There is the 2014 system reference document as well, though it's used and it's intended for publishers to be able to publish against it.
You can, of course, give this to your students for free and they have all of the rules in PDF that they can use to play 2014 D&D. I, of course, again, thanks to the outstanding support that we've had from people who have bought our books and people that support us on Patreon, we feel comfortable being able to give away a good chunk of our material, too, under a Creative Commons license.
And we have the Lazy GM's resource document, which has a whole bunch of stuff taken from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM's Workbook, the Lazy DM's Companion, all available for free online. It's available in PDF. It's available in EPUB. It's available as HTML, Markdown.
and available for both to give to people so that you can just hand it to them and also usable for published products of your own because it's released under Creative Commons Attribution License. You can find all the information about the license in there. We do the same thing with information from Forge of Foes.
We gave away a good chunk of Forge of Foes, including the Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating Tables. This is all available for free online in the Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document. Scott Gray, Teo Sabadia, and myself released this under a Creative Commons license as well, so you can share it. Lots of stuff there. What else?
The Shadowdar Quickstart set is free for PDF online, and you can get the physical version of that for $20. It's a very good deal. We have the 2014 pre-generated characters that we give away for Fantastic Adventures and Ruins of the Grendel Roots. There is, of course, free adventures.
If you're looking for free adventures for your school program, we have the Nightblade, which is available from Fantastic Adventures for free. Ruins of the Grundle Roots, Call of Starsong Tower, we give that away for free. And Caves of the Cockatrice and Ash Snarl Secret were given away from Fantastic Layers. So all of the links to these are available. You can give them to you.
You can use them in your school program. And of course, you can reach out to Let's Quest as well. And hopefully they can help you. And if you're interested in giving back yourself, take a look at Let's Quest because that could be a good way to do so. So we were very happy to do that. I always feel bad that we go on the show and say, hey, there's this thing that we did.
And by the way, it's already almost certainly full up. But unfortunately, there are many both. Fortunately, there are many after school programs and many of them are looking for this kind of help. We are very happy to help.
And the way the reason that Michelle and I are able to help school programs like this is through your outstanding support from Patreon and support for our products and everything like that. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for that. Kobold Press released a new encounter builder that is kind of fun because it is based on the CR budget that the Tales of the Valiant Monster Vault uses.
which i wrote so it's kind of neat because this one is using the encounter building guidelines that are are loosely based on the lazy encounter building guidelines and the ones that i was commissioned to do for kobold press for tales of the valiant and now there's an actual online tool to help you select monsters based on those based on those guidelines it's actually looks very very similar to kobold fight club if you recall there was a great tool called kobold fight club that let you do encounter balancing and stuff like that and choose monsters and whatnot and
and they actually so a new group picked that up i forget the name of it but now kobold fight club is now held by another group and that other group forked a copy of the code of kobold fight club to build it around kobold presses and counter builder and so they did they were probably commissioned by it but that's why it looks so similar to kobold fight club is it's based on kobold fight club code but it was done by the people who now own and maintain kobold fight club and the cool thing is like you can pick the number of characters you can say i have
You know, five level eight characters. It tells you what an easy encounter is, a challenging encounter, a hard encounter. It tells you what like the top CR is that's likely for those level characters. And then it gives you an idea. You can actually do some like random. So we can say like, let's do a random hard encounter. And it's like, how about Scorched Rakes and a Nightmare or a Lich Virtuoso?
And of course, you can look up monsters in here. You can say, look up a Balor. And you could add like a Balor to it if you want it to be really hard. And that'll tell you like, that's deadly, right? Feels really deadly, right? Difficulty hard, feels really deadly. And that's because you threw a Balor in it.
So if you're looking for a free online character or free online encounter builder to help you kind of sort through monsters and pick monsters for it. If you like the lazy encounter benchmark that I have put out under, you know, again, it's released under greater comments license, but also available in the Kobo Press Monster Vault.
And now the Kobo Press Tales of the Valiant Game Masters Guide, which just came out, also has encounter building guidelines like that. Here is a tool that is built off of those encounter building guidelines. So pretty cool. If you like Kobold Fight Club, if you like having an online tool to help you build encounters like this, then you have this tool.
Of course, one of the designs behind the Lazy Encounter benchmark is that it's easy enough that you can keep it in your head. And just by keeping it in your head, you can take a look at what encounters you are building and decide how difficult do I think these things are going to be and build it off of that. But a lot of people like to have an online tool like that.
And the encounter builder by Cobalt Press is one of them. It looks really, really cool. I haven't really there's ways to save it. There's also ways to import it into improved initiative, which is another online tool. It's kind of neat to see these sort of small tools that have interconnections between them. I really like that idea.
I don't know if there's like, I suppose there's like a JSON export of this, of this kind of thing. You can import your custom monsters. So over here, when you're selecting your monsters, there's a filter link and you can go in here and hit manage sources.
And it shows you all of the sources of all of the monsters, including pretty much all of the monster books from Kobo press, but then a whole bunch of other, you know, a whole bunch of other different ones as well. And community monsters as well. Can't really, can't really see it in the, in the dark mode. I bet you it looks better in the light mode.
Yeah, so you can get a better idea of the different kind of monsters that exist from different sort of, including flea mortals, which is interesting. First time I've seen flea mortals showing up in here. So, neat stuff. If you're looking for a tool to help you build encounters, you can find a link to the Kobo Press Encounter Builder in the show notes below.
Dread Thingonomicon is a massive book made by Raging Swan. We're going to actually, let's take a look at it. So Dread Thing and Omicron is a 480-page book filled with random encounters and random information about all different kinds of places. And it was really funny. The other day, I was playing a game, and I had a troll who was well-read.
And the troll had a whole bunch of stack of books around there. And then somebody said, I want to go look at those books and see what those books are. And I'm like, I totally don't know what books should be in there. And then I quickly was able, I didn't even see some of this stuff, but I quickly pulled up this PDF and looked for books and immediately found a whole bunch of books.
And I had them roll a few times and come up with a bunch of different books. This book saved me in that situation. I would have needed those books otherwise. It has tons of different random tables for all different kinds of places and situations that you would find in your game. All the things that you might find in a Cobalt Warn or Hill Giant Steading.
When if you're looting the dead, lots of different situations to find tons of different random tables to help you fill out the details of your game. Very, very useful for shaking up your own the cobwebs of your own mind when you're digging into something and also useful to have on hand. So you might improvise it. I had a digital version.
Luckily, I am probably going to move my physical version up to my library so that I can quickly pull it off the shelf and do a quick scan and find some good stuff. It is a massive book, so it might take you a little bit of work in order to kind of dive through it to find the exact stuff that you want. But it is a very cool book. And it is on sale on the bundle of holding for $8.
Normally, it's $28. So you're getting a really, really good value of this book. $8 for this massive 400-page book of random tables is a really, really good value. From the time that this video and podcast goes out, you only have a couple of days to pick it up.
So you probably want to go and grab it as soon as you can because it is only available for a few days and only about two days after I do this recording. So check it out. It is a really, really good book. I've also done a spotlight on it in the past if you want to dive in a little bit more. You can find a preview to it over on DriveThruRPG if you want to look at it.
But it is just a really, really good, powerful book.
of tons and tons and tons of random information sorted by the various locations where you might find them or various situations where the characters might get involved in stuff so if you're looking for piles of random tables to to kind of shake up your brain this is a fantastic way to do it also completely human generated not a bunch of stuff generated by an artificial intelligence so check that out that's the dread thing in omicron bundle of holding
Over on Humble Bundle, Goodman Games has a great big D&D 5e book bundle going on where you can pick up 38 different adventures and source books and things like that for 39 for 30 bucks. That's like, I think it's like 70. Let's do some math here. 39 divided by 30. No, that's the wrong way. 30 divided by 39. $0.77 per product that you get.
If you are looking for a great big pile of adventures, sometimes you just want to get a big pile of adventures to kind of sort through and get ideas. Oh, that's a neat idea. Or just a map that you want to use. Or just a map plus some room descriptions that you want to use. or just the story of an adventure that you want to grab onto and then turn into a homebrew adventure.
I think a lot of times you're like, God, who the hell needs 39 adventures? I can't even read 39 adventures. I'm certainly not going to run 39 adventures. My opinion is you don't have to run them all. You don't even have to read them all thoroughly. You can just sort of just bathe in them. You can pick them up, you open them up, kind of flip through them when you have some time.
Way better than surfing the net and checking your Twitter account and doing all that stuff. Go read an adventure and get ideas from it. Maybe you just have an NPC that you think is cool. Maybe you have the map that is cool. But for $30, normally, like, adventures, maybe you get two. And instead, you're getting 39 adventures from Goodman Games. All different kinds of stuff here.
Really, really big book of adventures. Lots of different adventures for your 5th edition games. And again, maybe you're not playing 5th edition, but Goodman Games definitely has an old-school style to a lot of the adventures they write. So it is certainly a way that you can... modify these adventures to run with pretty much any fantasy system that you're playing. Really outstanding stuff.
At $30 for 39 products. Bundles of Holding in particular. Bundles of Holding and Humble Bundles are probably your best value in RPG products. If you are looking to really get a lot of value for not a lot of money, keep an eye on Humble Bundles and Bundles of Holding because they are an outstanding way to get really highly polished products for your role-playing games for a very low amount of money.
So very cool. So that's Goodman Games' Humble Bundle. Our friends over at Ghostfire Games has done a Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter. It's doing very well. 2,600 backers, 25 days to go, almost a half a million dollars that they've pulled in for this. And Grim Hollow is a kind of a dark fantasy setting for 5e.
They had released this previously, and now they're updating it by increasing a lot of the material that they put into Grim Hollow and also making it fully support D&D 2024. Which is pretty interesting. One of the things, one of the rewards that they're offering is access to D&D Beyond. I think Ghostfire is the only company I know. Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.
They seem to be the only company I know that is able to sort of advertise D&D Beyond access to their material through Kickstarter. That's a really interesting angle. That's something that... I wouldn't normally expect. But they're not just putting it on D&D Beyond. They are also putting it out on Foundry and Alchemy and Roll20 as well.
So they're hitting four different virtual tabletop options for Grim Hollow. And as you can see, just by looking at this, this is something Ghostfire does really, really well. Tons of different accessories, all kinds of special dice and cards, DM screens, collector's editions, the main editions of the book, all this kind of stuff that they've got. It's really interesting stuff.
It is interesting to kind of see them putting out a update to an existing one that they had done. I have the original Grim Hollow guides, and I'll be honest, I didn't dive into them so thoroughly or certainly use them in my game that I feel like, oh, I definitely need to upgrade to the new one. So I'm probably not going to back this myself because I still have the old Grim Hollow books.
I presume that old Grim Hollow books work just as well as they would back when I bought them. And it is going to be interesting to see. This is the first time I've seen a big company saying, hey, we're going to update our stuff for D&D 2024 in particular. So what that means is interesting.
Now, I think, like, are they banking on the idea that there absolutely will be a 5.2 SRD for them to build off of? Or do they feel like even with the 5.1 SRD, they have enough that they should be able to build 2024 compatible material without even necessarily having to bank on that new SRD? That is kind of interesting stuff.
But if you like the work that Ghostfire Games does, they do outstanding work, beautiful products, super high production value. I have friends that work there. My friend Sean Merwin works there. Joey Haik works there. There's really outstanding designers that are working on this kind of stuff. Please check out the Ghostfire Gaming Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter.
I do not think that they have a sample, unfortunately, of their new material. So the one thing I really would love to see here on the Grim Hollow is a, hey, here's a PDF that shows you what this material looks like. But what I can tell you is I own a lot of Ghostfire books, and they are all outstanding books. Very high production value. They look really well. They look excellent. Very well edited.
Very cool stuff. So, you know, if you like the theme of this, if you like what you're seeing, definitely consider backing this project. That is the Grim Hollow Transformed Kickstarter going right now on Kickstarter. Ars Magica is a system, honestly, I don't really know anything about it.
I don't know about Ars Magica, but I know when this hit, a lot of folks on my Discord server were very excited about this. They know the Ars Magica system. They like the Ars Magica system. And when they heard about this, we had a lot of conversation about it, and it was interesting. And that's that Ars Magica, it says, Ars Magica RPG becomes open license via crowdfunding.
So I think that they are going to be doing a crowdfunding. If they haven't done it, they're doing it, yeah, October 15th, they're going to do a crowdfunding campaign to take the rule set. And what they say is both the rule set and setting of Ars Magica and releasing it under an open license.
And the open license that they are going to release it under is a Creative Commons attribution share alike license. And we're going to talk about the share alike license a little bit. I know we love talking about various gaming licenses here on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. But I think it's pretty interesting.
It's one of the few times I've seen a RPG group put out a setting under a Creative Commons license. So that could be very interesting. Again, I kind of don't know about the system of Ars Magica or what kind of makes it different. So I can't say like, oh, this is outstanding because the system is so fantastic. But I know people that are very excited about it.
And anytime that I see a group who is taking their material that they have and putting it out under an open license, I think it's outstanding. Because I think it's an area where we are making the whole hobby bigger and better. And for them, and they stated in this... It's a way to ensure that whatever happens in the future, these rules are out there and available to people to use.
And I think that that is fantastic. One interesting change about the license that they are using is the share-alike component. So there are, I don't know how much this matters to GMs overall, but it certainly matters to publishers. There are various types of Creative Commons licenses available.
There's one known as CC0, and Worlds Without Numbers actually uses a CC0 license for their rules, which means you don't even have to attribute to them that you're using their rules. It's basically saying all this stuff is available in the public domain, and you can use it any way you want, with or without attribution.
That is a very, very open license that actually very few people use because the attribution part is so easy to do. Why wouldn't you want attribution? I release a lot of my material under Creative Commons Attribution License, also known as a CC BY license.
The Share-A-Like license, there's one that's a CC non-commercial license, and the non-commercial license means you're able to use all of this material, but not in any commercial way. That's actually very restrictive because it means even if you put up on our website and you have links in that website that get you any kind of a referral fee, that counts as a commercial use.
So a lot of stuff that uses a non-commercial license is very limited. I release all of the articles for Sly Flourish available under a non-commercial license. I'm not quite comfortable enough to say it's commercial because somebody could theoretically take the entire site. They could move all the files somewhere and then riddle it with ads and then try to out SEO me.
In order to get money from ad revenue. I don't want that to happen, which is why I release all of the articles on Sly Flourish under a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license. So there are reasons why you'd want that license. The share alike license, some might think is kind of similar to the way that the OGL worked and that the new ORC license works.
with the intention that you're able to use it even for commercial work, but you have to release your own material under that same license. You have to release your material under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, making it what they refer to as a viral license. This means that if you decide to use anything from this, you have to release everything in this going down.
Now, there's some questions, and I actually did a little bit of digging around on things like, when would you want to use this if that was a limitation? Because, for example, if you take the Ars Magica system and you build adventures around it using this Creative Commons license, You have to release your adventure under the same license, but what about art? What about maps? What about layout?
What about other aspects of this? Does that mean every aspect of the product that you make, it also has to be released under a creative commons attribution share alike license. There was actually a lawsuit and it actually went to court and, and, and actually finished the,
Going through court, which is rare, usually there's some kind of settlement, about using a Creative Commons attribution share-alike license as a cover to an album. I think it was like a travel CD-ROM kind of thing. And the person used a piece of commercially usable Creative Commons share-alike artwork on the cover. but not for anything internal.
And the court said, no, the stuff that you use inside can be separate from the use of the image because you didn't actually transform the image or use that image anywhere else. I'm not a lawyer. I can't give legal advice. When I think about how you could use something like this, my understanding is any of the text that you would create
that use this license that text should be released under the same creative commons share alike license but things like artwork and layout and maps and other assets that you create for your product that are based on your stuff that you didn't like transform from their work that stuff can still be copywritten so you could make a product i believe this is true i think you'll have to you know do your own research right and talk maybe talk to a lawyer about it
But you should be able to keep your artwork, your maps, your layout, your physical design of your product separate from the text. the text of your work that actually transforms what Atlas Games is doing with Ars Magica, that you should be able to release and you would have to release under a Creative Commons share-alike license.
Maybe when they launch this campaign, the share-alike is obviously a really complicated situation and maybe during the license we can talk to them and say, hey, it would be really better, especially since you're asking for funding to release this stuff under a Creative Commons license, of maybe making it a Creative Commons attribution license instead of a share-alike license.
I think that there would be a significantly, it would be a much, let's say everybody switched over to a share alike license. I think it would be far more limiting in the kinds of products that we would be able to create overall.
If like, for example, Wizards of the Coast had released a 5.1 SRD under a share alike license, and some people said they should, I think it would be a lot harder to make it. And there's all these like weird gray areas of what stuff can I protect and what stuff do I have to release that a lot of creators who are just trying to make a product wouldn't be able to navigate.
that's a lot easier to navigate when you're not using a share alike license so it's the same issue with orc orc is a little different that you can actually protect some stuff and then other stuff has to be released so orc is slightly different than this i think i think even releasing under an orc license is probably a better license if you want to give downstream producers if you want to make downstream producers still have to release some of their mechanics in the open
but give the downstream producer the ability to protect certain parts of their work. The Oracle license works better for that. But my personal favorite is the Creative Commons attribution license flat. Let downstream producers decide how they want to release their material and you release your material so that people can use it with just attribution. It's a lot simpler. Anyway, interesting stuff.
We'll take a look at this again later this month when they actually start the crowdfunding campaign. And maybe they'll be able to answer some questions about what they mean when they talk about a share-like license. I have a dirty trick for setting up a scenario in my tabletop role-playing games that I really enjoy.
It's a way to put a really fun situation in front of players, even if their characters are significantly powerful. And that's having them run into two bandits in the woods. So if they're wandering around in the woods, they're trying to stalk something out.
Having two bandits hanging out in the woods, even when the characters are significantly more powerful than them, is a really fun scenario that gives a lot of agency to the players to decide how they want to navigate this.
For example, if they just walk up and say, howdy-do, and they alert those bandits, those bandits might alert an entire camp to the fact that there are people wandering around in the woods. The characters can decide, you know what, we're just going to be really stealthy and assassinate those guys so they don't make any noise, and that can work.
Or they could sit around and listen to what those bandits have to say, and could learn interesting secrets and clues from the bandits as they're talking to them. So one of the interesting things you can do is have those bandits talking about the characters. That this is a way for you to be able to kind of show off the reputation that the characters have created by...
Having the bandits talking about them. Hey, have you heard about those new adventures that just took over Summervine Villa? Yeah, I was actually going to go there and work for them, but I heard there was some creepy stuff going on in the basement. Next thing I know, there's a great big party. And then I heard there was a huge bloodbath. And now these characters suddenly own Summervine Villa.
Isn't that wild? Yeah. Except, you know, the characters tend to go off and disappear for a while. But I know one of the people that works there. Maybe we could go sneak up there and rob the place while they're going. And now the characters are like, oh, man, these two bandits are going to rob us. That's interesting. Or like, wow, have you heard about the characters and what's going on?
This is sort of the idea of like when the characters pick up newspapers and they read about their own adventures. But now you have two bandits that are hanging out in the woods that are talking about like, man, did you hear what happened to that? Yeah, that creepy cult got wiped out. Oh, I wonder who did that.
So that way there is a way for the players to recognize that the world is changing based on their actions and the things that they've done. They're not operating in this completely myopic way where nobody actually has any understanding. And instead they could say things like, Oh yeah, Hey, I went to see that new show. They were doing a preview of a new show at the theater of whispers.
And it was this crazy show about this, like, you know, these, this dragon warlord, the direct, this dragon born warlord and his love for his son and his, his mother, his wife also loved the son, but they both pretended they didn't. And then in order for him to show his strength to his lieutenants, he murdered his own son and, Because it was his only weakness.
And then his wife was so upset with this that she hired her ancient elven assassins to kill him and everyone else in the family so that the whole family would never be able to go forward. Man, it was depressing. But boy, it was really good. You know, and I never even heard this story before.
And you're like, oh, yeah, it was the characters who found that tale and brought it to the guy at the theater of whispers to tell the tale. So the characters are seeing the actions that they have done and how it's changing the world around them in this really fantastic situation where the players get to eavesdrop upon two, you know, scruffy bandits that are hanging around or whatever.
And I'm talking about two bandits, but it could be anybody. It could be two cultists in the weird. It could be, you know, any like two spirits having a conversation in an old haunted ruin. It could be two were rats in an old den.
whatever you know just you you can set up these encounters and these encounters of just a couple of people talking is a really fun encounter because players know that they can probably take these guys out even a first level group can take out two bandits very easily so it's a really really low power combat group but combat might still take place and there might still be some like well i want to sneak up on them and i'm gonna get just the right shot or you know i'm a really acclaimed doctor is there a way for me to fire my bow and hit through the neck of one into the other and kill both with one shot you
They're like, yeah, you can line it up. You'll be a disadvantage on the shot, but if you hit, it'll succeed. You can do stuff like that. But then also they might say, oh, I like these guys. Let's convert them to our side. Or maybe we'll pretend to be somebody else and we'll go have a talk with them. Or maybe we'll just sneak around them so that we don't alert them at all.
So the neat thing about having them run into two bandits or any two kind of weak guard type creatures in any dungeon that you're running is it actually has a lot of different options for the players to decide how they're going to engage with it. You don't know how they're going to engage with it. Players won't know until they talk to one another and figure out what they want to do.
Their motivations could change. But then the other dirty trick is we can have them talking about the characters and talking about the things that the characters have done and talking about the way the world worked. And it's really an excellent way to reveal secrets and clues.
But it's also a way to show the players what repercussions have, what has happened in the world around them based on the action that they have. It's a really fun trick. Very easy to do. You can drop it in almost any game.
And it's just a it's a really fantastic way to show the breadth of the world, to show how the characters have been able to change that world and to give the players a situation that they can navigate. That's a lot of fun for them to navigate because it gives them so much agency over their choices in the woods. Every month on Sly Flourish, we have the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A.
Any patron of Sly Flourish is able to ask any RPG-related question. Every Friday, I get my coffee, I sit down, and I answer all of the questions on the Q&A. Some of those questions I bring here to the show so that we can dive deeper and all sort of get more out of the questions that are being asked.
Today, the Knights of the Roleplay podcast says, what is the single most important thing you would tell to a new DM? Oh, that's such a good question. And it's really hard because there's lots of things I want to tell to a new DM.
I think the single most important thing for a new DM to recognize about the game that they might not recognize about the game is that the real story of the game happens while you're playing. You're not making a story up ahead of time. You are setting up a situation that...
And then the story is going to come from setting up the situation and having the characters act in that situation and the world reacting to the actions of the characters. That is when we talk about like the core mechanic of the game or the core interaction of the game of the DM describes the situation, the player describes what they want to do, and the DM adjudicates the results.
That is pretty much the game loop that occurs for most role-playing games, lots of role-playing games, most role-playing games that have a GM and a player.
certainly for dnd and 5e and of course there's complications and they're like what if it turns out that the thing they want to do isn't a sure thing well then you roll a die you pick a difficulty class you add modifiers and so on but the real gameplay loop is the gm describes the situation going on in the game the player describes what they want their character to do and the gm adjudicates the result that is the loop and that key of setting up the situation is the hard part i think a lot of gms
A lot of new GMs come there wanting to tell a story, and they've written a story, and they are spending a lot of time thinking about what's going to happen based on things the characters are going to do that the characters might not do. And that's why situation-based gaming, I think, is a much stronger, more resilient, and far more fun approach, which is a less story-focused prep.
and prepping instead for the story to occur during the game itself. I think it's a weird bit about understanding how role-playing games work.
But beyond understanding that idea of like, hey, we're all sitting around a table telling tales of make-believe with a rule set that's helping us keep in line of what GMing is, what RPGs are like, the next step is understanding that you're not coming there telling a story that the players and the characters navigate in one path.
you are creating a situation and the characters are going to navigate that situation. There are veteran DMs who don't really understand that. So I think that that is the single most important thing that a new GM can really pick up on that is not typical to how they think about it. However, I have more and I have these top tips for dungeon masters. It really should be top tips for game masters.
I've probably changed the title on this. that I wrote back in 2021. And I kind of took this from conversations that I've had with all kinds of game masters and from experience playing lots of games and talking to lots of games and doing lots of study into this topic. So these aren't just my ideas. These are ones that I have taken from many different sources.
And as you can see, the very first one is let the story unfold at the table. Set up situations and let the characters navigate them. Those are actually like, I kind of put those two into that one rule. Other ones are be on the character's side, that you're there to make them look like big damn heroes. So what are you setting up your situations to make sure that the characters look cool?
Bathe in their victories, right? Don't get, this isn't a competitive game. You're not trying to thwart the characters. You're trying the characters to look awesome. How do you get the characters to look awesome? Use tools and techniques that help you prepare to improvise. I talk about this a lot in our prep. I talk about it a lot with the tools that we use.
What are the tools that can help you let that story unfold in ways that you didn't know? So focusing on your next game, keep that aperture closed. I have a bunch of friends that I'm going to be playing with in one hour. We're going to have about a three-ish hour game. I want to make sure that I have all the material that I need to run that three-hour game.
I don't need to worry about the game we're running after. I don't need to worry about where the campaign is going to go. I really want to focus on what is the next game that we're going to run and maybe what are the seeds that I'm going to put in the next game that will feed us to the game after that. But focusing on your next game.
Build the world campaign and adventures from the characters outwards. Spiral development. We talk about this in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Where do you start and start around the characters and build outwards? I have this dragon empire. I have all of these dragon lords. I have this massive campaign that I'm working on, but I'm focused on one spot.
And that one spot is the 440 Fingers Outpost that exists in the middle of the desert that is sort of in the outer fringes of the draconic control area. but is a part of a major trade route that's going across. And the adventure is there is a well that is critical for all of the animals and all of the people. And the well is corrupt. And what is corrupting the well? That is the adventure, right?
And that's the thing that we're going to focus on in the first session of our game. I'm not worried about the great big plot line that's going on after that. I have some ideas. I have some things, but I'm not filling those out. I'm worried about my next game. Pay attention to pacing. Pacing is really important.
How do you make sure that the pacing stays high, that you have upward beats and downward beats and upward beats and downward beats so the players are staying engaged with the game? Too many upward beats and the game seems boring. Too many downward beats and it seems depressing and lame.
you want to make sure that good things are happening bad things are happening good things are happening and bad things are happening and you want to have your hands on the dial so that you can speed the game up when you need to speed it up slow it down when it's time to slow things down that you can keep that pacing pacing is a really critical skill it is a lifelong skill that takes us forever to do all of us kind of suck at it sometimes we we get a few different tools that help us but pacing is really important
Focusing on the fiction first, the mechanics second. This is a game about telling a story. The mechanics are helping us tell that story. It is not just wargaming at the table anymore like it was 50 years ago. There's definitely wargames out there that are very heavy on mechanics, but the story is what we're going to remember.
The story of the characters, the story of their actions, the story that takes place during the game. The mechanics are there to serve the story. So make sure that we are focused on that story first and choosing what monsters we pick, what DCs we set, what kind of situation. Think about how that fits based on the fiction and the situation of the game.
And recalling that this is a wonderful, endless hobby that we can continue to play and that we can continue to get better at for the rest of our lives. You cheated. You asked for one. That one that I brought up where I'm combining these two together is recognizing that the story takes place at the table, that you are not building a story ahead of time when you're running.
That's definitely my number one tip. Thank you for a outstanding question. See, super short question with a big long answer. David P. says, question about lightning rods when the player's build requires them to engage the lightning rod. I've had this a couple of times, most notably with a grappler, but also with a Tempest Cleric and lightning damage. I can add a lightning rod, e.g.
an obvious single monster or an acid pool, to the fight, but I can't force my grappler to take that monster on. I also don't want to dictate tactics to the player and say, grappler, you should do this. What's a good way to add lightning rods when engaging with the rod is out of the control of the DM? I can't shoot the monk. I have to wait for the monk to shoot the rod. So good, good question.
And I think, yeah, so just to reiterate on the idea of a lightning rod, a lightning, and there's an article on Sly Flourish about lightning rods that I will link to. And we also talk about this in Forge of Foes.
A lightning rod is essentially a monster that you are putting into a battle that's specifically designed for the characters to be able to use one of their abilities to be able to deal with it.
An example would be if you have a cleric who just loves using banish and you throw a really low charismatic big brute monster that can hit like a freight train in there specifically so that the cleric can banish it and keep it out of the battle. That's a lightning rod. It's sort of thinking about like your combat almost like a puzzle.
where certain parts of the puzzle are designed to match up against some character abilities. If you have a mage who loves throwing fireballs and you're like, guess what? You know, 20 orcs of Grumsh are charging at you in a perfect 20-foot radius right at you. Then they go, I'm going to fireball those guys. Oh, they all explode outwards, flying out in pieces. That is an example of a lightning rod.
Having tons of low-level undead for your cleric to destroy with turn undead is an example of a lightning rod.
and lightning rods are a really great way to make the characters feel cool to build interesting challenges in there but you have this issue like what if they don't do it what if the cleric doesn't use turn undead right now a lot of times you can make it really obvious that certain abilities are going to be very effective against certain monsters right so you could say like this dumb brute if you you can say things like if somebody doesn't control you real your character realizes if you don't find a way to control this brute he's gonna he's gonna chew through you with that giant spike club of him and
And they go, oh man, how do we do that? So I think it's okay. Again, there's another sort of rule in here, which is that players only understand about half of the things that you're throwing out there. It's okay to reinforce it or describe it a different way. And you don't have to say like, this is your grapple monster.
But you can even joke about how like the guy's weak knees and his center of balance seems so much higher than yours. And, you know, his greatest fear would be falling onto his back and being uncontrolled. Right. You can you can, you know, exaggerate the effects. But there are times where the lightning rod is just not going to be used. hit by lightning.
That whatever you're trying to do either isn't going to work, like you try to banish the big brood and it succeeds on the saving throw. So you don't want to put in lightning rods where if they don't deal with it, it's absolutely going to be a TPK. Because now you're kind of forcing the situation the other direction. They better control this or they're going to die.
So if I throw 20 orcs at the characters that comes running at them in a 20-foot radius circle... maybe they don't fireball them and maybe they have to fight 20 orcs. And now the battle's a lot harder, but they could still manage to fight 20 orcs. So you don't want to make it so one and zero that they absolutely have to use the lightning rider. It doesn't work or it's going to be a TPK, right?
So you, you want to have, you want to have some options that maybe they're not going to be able to deal with this with their typical way of dealing with it because the dice might be against them or maybe they don't figure it out. And that just means it's a much harder fight. And you can see this in video games.
Baldur's Gate 3, you know, you're playing Baldur's Gate 3 and there's a time where you're like, wow, this battle was super hard. I managed to do it, but it was really, really hard. And then it turns out, oh, I could have negotiated with this other guy first so that I would only have to fight half of the people in that battle. And actually they would have been on my side if I'd done that.
So there are still ways to succeed, even though you're not following through the optimal path. So I think that's something you want to think about when you're putting your lightning rod creatures in there is ensure that it doesn't have to be optimal in order to work at all.
And instead, it could be that this battle would be harder if they don't do this, but they certainly have opportunities to do this. That's a good one. And then, of course, you always have your hands on the dials. If it turns out that they're not affecting your lightning rod and now the battle is way harder, or worse, the pacing isn't right, it's okay for a battle to be harder.
But if the pacing isn't right and now it's a boring-ass slog because they didn't banish the rock and the rock has 270 hit points, you can dial those hit points down so that they can deal with the rock another way. That's okay. Right. Like you're presupposing how the battle is going to play out a little bit, but you're doing so to make sure that the game is fun.
And as long as you're ensuring that the game is fun, it is OK to modify things. You can still have the pacing and the situation of the game change because they didn't lightning rod it.
But if it's going to be a slog or it's just going to be way too hard and it's not meeting the beats and the pacing that you want, then you have other tools at your disposal like the dials of monster difficulty that you can turn up and down to make sure that a battle feels the way that is most fun for the group.
necessarily the way you intended it to feel because now that is presupposing but making sure that the players are having a good time they don't feel like they had no choice and no chance at all and instead it's like no they are able to turn this thing around because of these other dials that you have in there so that's that's my thought about how to deal with lightning rods i i think sometimes it's okay to tell them i think sometimes it's okay to make it really really clear maybe find a different way to describe it that might trigger the idea in the head of your player oh i could use my turn on dead for this
And sometimes you can just have the conversation and tell them, like, hey, there are going to be times where there's going to be situations that are optimal, so take a look at all the abilities that you have, because you might find that some of your abilities are going to be far more effective than others. Eric C says, have you seen the example tool uses in the player's handbook 2024 page 220?
I feel like they just took a bunch of things DMs have correctly been letting players do automatically and added a skill check. Imagine you have a makeup kit you're proficient with and you say, I want to put on makeup and your DM makes you roll a D20. No one reviewed this. I actually talked about this on the last show, but I want to talk about it again because I think it's a really good point.
I was talking with some friends of mine, I was talking with Teo Sabadia, who mentioned that they were talking about it in the Mastering Dungeons Discord as well. We're going to take a look at this because there was sort of a... There's kind of two rules that interact in the D&D 2024 Players Handbook that are in different parts of the book that have caused this confusion a little bit.
And I think there's something they could have done. It's too late now. Book is out. Book is out. Book is done. It's not going to change. Where we can take a look at this. So we have the 2024 Players Handbook. So what we're talking about is under Tools. I'm on D&D Beyond. And under Tools, you have a description that says you have the ability to use the tool, utilize... I hate the word utilize...
Entry lists things you can do with the tool when you take the utilize action. You can do one of those things each time you take the action. This entry also provides the DC for the action. They could have just... They could have added one word that would have made this better, which is also provides the default DC for the action.
If they had just said that, they just add... And you could do it with your head. Just...
squint real hard and imagine the word default in there and you're all set and then craft everything so you look at this and you have alchemist supplies identify a substance dc-15 start a fire dc-15 this one's funny because like is it really that hard to start a fire and you need to roll a dc-15 check like what is it you have oil in there you have paper you have alchemist fire you already have alchemist fire you already have a fire
You know, does it really take a DC-15 to start a fire? You know, seal or pry open a door or container with car-produced tools is a DC-20. If you look at, like, some, like, trap-finding tools or, you know, where's the trap? Where are the thieves' tools? Pick a lock, DC-15, or disarm a trap, DC-15. Does that mean every trap in the world is a DC-15 and every lock is a DC-15? No.
So it says that here and it makes it sound and the one that our friend brought up was was apply makeup DC 10 right that you have a disguise kit but for you to apply makeup is a DC 10. Now I could say it's reasonable to require that they have to apply makeup if they're attempting to do something with it if they're trying to use it to like.
you know have a good costume versus a bad costume or something like that you could certainly have them but if you're just putting makeup on you can say you just put makeup on so everybody's like i can't believe that they are forcing all of these dcs on us and that everyone's going to do them how that's terrible the answer however is if we go back to the playing the game section and we go to d20 tests
We have difficulty class. The difficulty class of an ability check represents the task difficulty. The more difficult the task, the higher the DC. The rules provide DCs for certain checks, but the DM ultimately sets them. So there are the one, two, three, four, five, six, six. There are the six words that modify the thing in the other section of the book.
It is really unfortunate that they didn't add the word default. If they had added the word default to the other one or even taken this part and said, this one has DCs, but the DM ultimately checks them. If they just added those words to the other part too, I think this confusion wouldn't be there.
But because you have one rule in one early part of the book that changes the rule in the other part of the book. that that made it harder to recognize. But that's why we can talk about it here on the show, and that's why we can spread this information around, because it is very clear that the DM decides this. And we don't even have the DMG yet.
When we get the Dungeon Master's Guide, I'm almost certain it's going to have rules in there to help DMs describe different difficulties based on different situations, even when they're using kits. So that is one part of it. The other part of it, though, is, and I talked about this last week as well, sometimes it's nice to have a default, right?
Because the default means that the DM doesn't have to always come up with a DC for this. There are certain ones here that are just already done. And you can say you're going to use that, you know, if you want to use an herbalism kit, you do the default DC. And now the DC is already set. And actually, the old versions of D&D were this way, that pre-third edition.
first, second, OD&D, and stuff like that, had set ranges for things that were like skills, like bend bars and lift gates, or disarm traps, or sneak, had fixed rates for the character that would go up with character level. And they would get better at it as they got better in character level, but the rate was not determined by other things.
Now, DMs definitely learned how to say like, oh, well, this one's really hard, so it's actually minus 30 to your percentile check for picking a lock. And other games do this now with things like boons and banes. Dragonbane, for example, you roll under your ability score to see if you succeed. The DM doesn't do anything.
But you might put a bane on that, saying actually you have to roll a d6 and subtract that or add that to your number because this one's particularly hard. Shadow of the Demon Lord and Shadow of the Weird Wizard do the same thing. The default for anything is a 10. But you might get boons and banes depending on what you're trying to do that could make it harder than anything else.
But really, here in 5e, we have a bunch of default DCs. As GMs, we could just say, use the default, or we can set the DC. So it's really up to you to decide. I think that it would certainly have eliminated some confusion if they added a single word here. If they just said, provides the default DC for the action, that would have made me happy.
They could have also said that this entry provides the DC for the action, but the DM ultimately decides them. That would have been fine, too. You can just add those words in using your brain and your head. I also, here's what you do. I give you full permission to take a pen and take your physical version of the book and write in, in pen, right next to it. Mark up your book. Make it better.
Make it better than the books that are all out there. And write the DM, you know, this entry provides the action for the action, but the DM ultimately decides them. Write it in yourself. That can totally work. Jesse O says, I'm curious about whether you have thoughts on allowing players to run TOV, A5E, and D&D characters in the same game.
I think it'd be a bad idea for players to mix and match options from across systems when creating individual characters or leveling up, like Tales of the Valiant characters probably shouldn't use D&D feats instead of talents.
However, it seems like these characters could otherwise coexist in the same game, with some clarifications and minor adjustments based on which game mechanics the GM chooses to use. What do you reckon? So it's actually really interesting. I had this conversation because there is a new organized play program that Gamehole Publishing...
So the folks at Gamehole Con have a new thing called Gamehole Publishing. This is Alex Kammer, who runs a bar and gaming parlor known as the Gamehole in Madison, Wisconsin. Gamehole Con is actually going to be happening in a couple weeks. I will be there. I'm very excited about it. And they're starting a new organized play program, and they have a new thing called Wardens of the East Marches.
And in Wardens of the East Marches, we talked about this on the Sly Flourish Discord server, which you can get access to by being a patron of Sly Flourish. It's really awesome.
And one of the things is you are free to use any published 5e source that is physically printed, so not publications from the DMs Guild that do not have a print form options or things from Reddit, from which to create your character. The gold standard, though, for this program is the 5e Player's Handbook, originally published in 2014.
And my question was, does this mean that you can play Tales of the Valiant and A5E characters in this game? Because it's saying any public, they are physical books. I've got physical books for both of these. Tales of the Valiant is pretty popular. And, you know, they match us and they are 5E. They're 5E compatible books. So would they work?
And some people in the Discord server said, I think they're saying 5E is D&D. And I've had this conversation before. I don't think 5e is D&D anymore. 5e used to mean the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
Now 5e is an open platform that many different publishers have written products around, including multiple versions of the entire core game, like Tales of the Valiant, like a level up advanced 5e, like D&D 2014, and like D&D 2024. They are all variants of 5e now. That to me is the easiest way to think about them. It's the easiest way to recognize how these things all interact.
Many people disagree with me, but I think I'm right. So there we are. I've listened to them. I understand their point of view. I think I'm still right, because it means that no one company controls the hobby. And I think the 5e hobby in particular, because 5e is really good. So I said, well, let me email Alex. And I emailed Alex and I asked him about it.
And from the conversation we had, he said, I hadn't really thought about those, but I don't see why not. And I was like, that could be really interesting. Like, you know, it could be really interesting if we start to mix characters from different sides. And I think they're still going to be figuring this out for the organized play program that they have.
But I started thinking about it and I was like, what would happen? So I'm running a level up advanced 5e game. And let's say my friend's daughter wants to come to the game and play. She's done this in the past. Would it be fun for her to come and play? But I didn't have time to whip up an A5E character because it can take a long time to build an A5E character at any given level.
But D&D Beyond, I can build a character in like 10 seconds. It's really easy for me to build a D&D 2014 or 2024 5E character very easily. What if I built like a D&D 2024 character that's at the level and then just had her use that at our game? How would that be? And we all thought about it. A bunch of us thought about it. We're like, I don't see why it wouldn't work.
That character might have some things that feel different. And there might be a couple of odds and ends where there might be an ability that doesn't operate quite right because the rule set that you're using is your standard rule set doesn't account for something. But generally speaking, you could probably figure that out at the game. And generally speaking, I think it would work.
So there are certainly probably times where a particular feature of a character is not going to work quite as you expect because you brought a Tales of the Valiant character to your 2024 D&D game. But I bet you could come up with something that would work.
An example would be there are character options in D&D 2024, I'm sorry, in Tales of the Valiant that are based on the Tales of the Valiant luck system. But if you're playing in a 2024 game, they're not using luck. So you'd never get those abilities to work. Now, part of it could be you just don't use those abilities.
And another one would be you negotiate with the DM to say, hey, I normally get this thing with luck. Can I get that with inspiration instead? Or can I just use luck? Can my character use luck, even if nobody else does, just so I have this thing? And DM's like, yeah, sure. So I think if you squint, you can probably get it to work.
So Jesse's question, though, says, like, what if you're really trying to mix these things? Like, you have a Tales of the Valiant character, and you have feats from this other book, and you're going to take this other stuff from Level Up Advanced 5e, and you're going to build this Gestalt character that's built from four different versions of 5e to optimize. Like, I'm going to use Power Attack.
I'm going to use Great Weapon Master from 2014 D&D. I'm going to use Counterspell from 2014 D&D. But I'm going to use a Tales of the Valiant combat maneuver from this other one and build these really crazy characters. I think that all comes down to a GM talking with the player about those abilities, looking at them, and recognizing that sometimes some stuff is not going to work out.
Particularly if you have characters that are optimizing across four editions of the game. But the reality is you're going to have players that are optimizing around one edition of the game, and they're still going to have characters that are super overpowered. So I don't think that expanding it out to include stuff from other sources is really where the problem is going to be. Because right now...
frickin' Silvery Barbs is still available for 2024 characters on D&D Beyond. And that's broken as hell. So there's a lot, you know, Twilight Clerics. You can now have 2024 Twilight Clerics. Those are already broken and they're all within one publisher. So the idea that if you suddenly add other publishers that it's gonna be a mess, I don't think that's really that much bigger a problem.
I think more likely is that you might have people that wanna bring like a 2014, or that people are gonna bring a character that's built around one system to a game that has another system. Maybe. I think it's still going to be rare. I have a feeling most of the time groups are going to get together. They're going to pick one core rule set like we did with Level Up Advanced 5e.
I've got two groups going. I'm going to have three different 5e groups here pretty soon. One of them is going to be playing Tales of the Valiant. One of them is going to be playing Level Up Advanced 5e. And one of them is still playing D&D 2014. All of those versions, though, are only using materials from those games because we limit source material anyway.
And I think as a GM, you should generally limit source material to make a game feel a certain way and make sure that the options aren't getting too out of bounds. So for Tales of the Valiant, we're only using the Tales of the Valiant Adventurer's Guide. For Level Up Advanced 5e, we're only using the Level Up Advanced 5e Adventurer's Guide.
And for 2014 D&D, we are using Tasha's and Xanathar's and the 2014 Player's Handbook, but nothing else. So we've limited our sources to make sure that there's a bounding on there. But if you have a player who's like, man, I found this character option that I think really matches the story of my character, I think it'd be really cool to have, and it's not overpowered, can you take a look at it?
And the DM says, yeah, that sounds cool, you could bring that in. I don't really see that that's really a big problem. But I think there is a way for all of these games to mix and match together. I think that there are ways for GMs to take parts of them and bring them in. I bring the luck system into every game. I think the luck system is far superior to inspiration.
So I've brought the luck system into all of my games because I really enjoy the luck system. So I have the Tales of the Valiant luck system going on in my level up advanced 5e game that uses inspiration. You can really mix all that stuff up, and I think it can work out. I refer to this as a beautiful mess. I've referred to the beautiful mess before.
And the idea is that as soon as Wizards of the Coast decided that they were going to have a 2024 version of D&D, and as soon as you had other publishers that are building core versions of 5e that are kind of compatible, mostly compatible, but with little odds and ends, and then you have so much other publisher material that isn't core material, but...
supplements, you know, other subclasses, other spells, all this stuff that what we have is this great, big, beautiful soup of 5e material that we get to go through as GMs, pluck the parts that we like and build the game that we want to run for the five people or six people that we have around our table. I think it's outstanding and I really like it.
So even though it's a mess, it's still a mess, but it is a beautiful mess. That's my opinion on that. Friends, I want to thank all of you for hanging out with me today while we talked about all things in tabletop role-playing games. If you enjoyed this show and you want to see more stuff like this, the best way to do so is to subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter.
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