The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide Walkthrough – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:03 D&D & RPG News: One Ring Bundle of Holding 03:57 D&D & RPG News: Haunted West 50% Off 04:52 Commentary: Running Mixed 5e Characters 20:18 DM Tip: Avoid the 2024 DMG's Enspelled Magic Items 33:14 Product Spotlight: Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: One Ring Bundle of Holding Haunted West 50% off (Coupon HOLIDAY24) Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide (Affiliate Link)
today on the lazy rpg talk show we have a couple of special deals on rpg products that we're going to talk about i have i now have practical experience running multiple different 5e characters and one game i'm going to talk about some of those experiences and what it means we're going to talk about the danger of inspelled weapons one of the new magic item types that's available in the 2024 dungeon masters guide and why you as a gm want to be very careful with that particular item
We're going to take a deeper look at the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, 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. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the fine patrons of Sly Flourish. If you want to be a patron of Sly Flourish, you can find a link down in the show notes below.
Patrons of Sly Flourish get access to all kinds of tips, tricks, tools, adventures, and other things to help them run their fantasy role-playing games. They get access to the awesome Lazy DM community over on Discord, and they help me put on shows like this. To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support.
By far the best deal in tabletop role-playing games is that of humble bundles and bundles of holding. Anytime I find an interesting humble bundle or bundle of holding, I like to bring it up on the show because you get a huge pile of role-playing game products for very little money. Often you're paying like 20 to $25 for products where normally they would be 20, $25 each.
And you usually get them for a dollar or $2 or sometimes less than a dollar. They're really good. And I have talked recently about the Lord of the Rings 5e. I actually have it sitting right here on my desk. I got the Lord of the Rings 5e thing. We talked about it being in D&D Beyond. You heard my recommendation that you probably want to get the physical version. It was on sale.
But One Free League, who makes Lord of the Rings for 5e, originally started, well, they picked up The One Ring, which is a dedicated role-playing game.
built for lore of the rings called the one ring and it is available in a bundle of holding right now the threshold price to pick up everything is 18 bucks so for 18 bucks you get the one ring core book the one ring lore master screen strider mode that's the starter collection and you get the ruins of the lost realm and the lands from the lone tales from the lone lands
Each of these are worth, you know, a fair bit of money and you're getting them for a very low price. If you just want the core book, you don't even have to pay the threshold. You can instead pay eight bucks and get the one ring RPG. I went ahead and paid the full amount of the 1868 to get the entire set.
So I haven't really dug into it yet, but I've heard very good things about the One Ring and it looks really neat. That's cool. So while our APR says Strider mode is actually the solo play. So if you want a way to play solo and Sean Tompkin is the creator of Iron Sworn, which is a fantastic solo RPG. So the idea of can you play the One Ring by yourself? The answer is yes.
And there's a 28 page guide to do so. So that could be a fun way. I really think that solo RPG play and I might try it out with this because it'd be really kind of fun to try out a new system and see it.
And one thing about solo RPGs, if you have the time and really maybe just get off social media for a while and instead go play a game, that you can really stretch your DM muscles, your GMing muscles, your ability to improvise, your ability to kind of shape stories from random events gets way better when you play solo RPGs.
You start to see what it's like to really fall into the story that you've got going on in your head. And that actually can help you when you're running games for you and your friends at the table. So I highly recommend solo RPGs as really good cross-training for GMs to stretch your improvisational muscles.
And for $8, you can get it as part of the One Ring 2E core rule set that's available on the bundle of holding right now. I picked it up. I recommend it. It's available for a while. You've got 24 days, but don't wait because you're going to forget. And then you're going to wait and you go, Oh, I missed out. Right. So go ahead and pick it up.
You can find a link to the one ring, the one ring bundle of holding, which is available right now on the bundle of holding. Haunted West by DarkerHue Studios is also currently half off. DarkerHue Studios is the maker of Haunted West and Harlem Unbound. The Haunted West, which includes the physical and PDF version, is half off with the coupon code HOLIDAY24. I just picked it up.
I haven't really flipped through it yet. But Haunted West is a re-imaging of the Old West in America that also includes supernatural aspects and a storyline and plotline that isn't written by a bunch of old white guys. So looks like a really interesting RPG. I've heard very good things about it. Winner of a couple different awards. Both that and Harlem Unbound won, I believe, any awards.
So check that out. You can find a link in the show notes to pick up your own copy of the Haunted West. physical and digital bundle for half off with the coupon. You have to put in the coupon code, which I will include in the notes as well. The coupon code is HOLIDAY24. One of the big questions that came out when D&D 2024 was coming out and everybody was really talking about compatibility.
What does compatibility mean? And I've heard many different takes from many people that I know and love and respect that are on different sides of, meh, who cares? Or they're only ever going to play the new one. All the old stuff is going to be dead as soon as they put the new books out anyway. Or, oh my God, they keep talking about compatibility. It's never going to work.
And I've been kind of like, you know, in the middle of the road. My argument is I don't think compatibility is that much of an issue in 5e because we as game masters are pretty good about adapting things. And I have been adapting a AD&D module written like 40 some years ago, 46 or 47 years ago to D&D 2024 with very little work.
So if I can convert something that's that old to the previous version of D&D, I didn't think I was going to have a lot of trouble with compatibility between one version or another. But it really came down to lots of questions of what do we mean by compatibility and what do you expect? What do you hope for?
Do you hope to be able to bring subclasses from old systems directly into the new ones and not have to change them at all? Do you expect to be able to bring subclasses from one version of 5e like Tales of the Valiant or like Level Up Advanced 5e and drop it right into your 2014 D&D character? And my argument is you're going to change stuff anyway. We're all going to change stuff anyway.
And I've been referring to this as a beautiful mess, that the beautiful mess is we have all this different 5e stuff written by all these different designers now over 10 years. And a lot of it is weird. And some of it, you never want to run. And some of it is really great. And you want to run all the time. And some of it, you're going to have to modify. And that's fine.
That's what running games is about. And for us to kind of build the version of 5e at our table that we want, I think is something we should embrace as an advantage of the game. The fact that we can all have this kind of general idea of what 5e is and then say, oh, I'd really like to take this thing from it, but let's modify it slightly to fit the style of the game that we want.
And that means if you find a subclass that you want to bring in that you think works thematically or a player brings in a subclass that you think works thematically, that you can then say, okay, let's look at the subclass and is there anything weird in it? And in some cases I've seen them where the subclass is too weak. Well, what if we added this? What if we added your ability to do this?
I did this with one of my players and one of the subclasses that was in the Tome of Heroes by Kobo Press just didn't quite play out. It just was the kind of thing it wasn't really much opportunity to use it. We said, well, what if we do, I think it was like switching an action to a bonus action. And it's like, what if we switch that to a bonus action? then that could work fine.
But one of the big questions about compatibility was, what happens if you run multiple characters from different 5e systems at the same table? I hadn't really heard a practical version of this until I saw the new rules that were coming out from Gamehole Studios, which is the producers Alex Kammer and GameholeCon were putting together a new organized play program.
for 5e and their argument was you can play any 5e character and i kind of emailed back i was like does that mean tales of valiant and he's i don't even know about tales of valiant i was like well now you do and it's 5e and he says i don't see any reason why we wouldn't and i was like oh i wonder how that'll work well then i started running a level up advanced 5e game my wednesday group which has been going on for 20 years now we've been playing we've played a whole bunch of different systems many a couple of the players there have been there for a really long time
And I mean, I think three of the players have been there for almost at least 15 years and longer. And so we started off with Level Up Advanced 5e. I said, I want to play Level Up Advanced 5e completely. So the Adventurer's Guide, Trials and Treasure, and the Monstrous Menagerie, that will be our core sets for this campaign.
And it was a City of Arches campaign set in my own setting of the City of Arches. And we started with that and we found a few things and there were a couple of players who just didn't really sit well with level up advanced 5e.
Their argument was there's a lot of extra complications in this system and those complications aren't really producing much output as far as the fun of the game is concerned.
And I can understand that there's things like skill specialization and there's things like combat weapon masteries and there's other things where it's, well, they're kind of neat, but there's also, they're really nitpicky and they, they, they add a lot of extra overhead that doesn't necessarily have a useful benefit for the extra overhead that they have. Not every player felt that way.
In fact, three of the players. So here's what I did. What I did is said, Hey, I want you guys to enjoy this game as much as you want. I don't want to constrain you to having to play this system if you're not digging the system. So I'm going to say that you can play any 5e character that you want, but it's got to be a core book character and you have to stay within that core book.
In other words, you can't pick special abilities from across multiple versions of 5e to amalgamate some kind of character because that's really hard to kind of figure out the balance for. But if you want to play a 2024 D&D character, you can do so. You can use the D&D 2024 Player's Handbook as your core book, and you can play a character from that.
If you want to play a Tales of the Valiant character, you can play with that. If you want to play a Level Up Advanced 5e, you want to stick with your Level Up Advanced 5e character, you can do that. If you want to play a 2014 D&D character, you can do that. And my only real rules for that was you have to stick to whatever the core book is for whatever system you're picking.
So the person picking a 2014 D&D character, for example, shouldn't have access to all the stuff that's available on D&D Beyond with Xanathars and Toshes and everything else. So it was more like, no, you have to pick the stuff that's available for that character in that source book, which is always tricky because D&D Beyond is a mess now when you try to do stuff like that.
So anyway, I had a few sessions where we did this now and we've had...
two to three people playing level up advanced 5e two to three people playing dnd 2024 and one person who for one session played a dnd 2014 character because they built it up really quickly and in one game we had three characters from three different three characters from three different systems and i think they were like level seven at the time so not super low level either they're actually like higher level in the dnd 2024 or their higher level period and then we got to see a bit of what these systems are like and how they work with one another when they're actually at the table
So what happened? What was that like? The answer was, it was like D&D. It was like everything else. I really didn't notice a big difference when playing characters from all of these different systems all in one game. The game played very much like I would expect it to play. We focused on interesting things happened in the story. Lots of fun things happened.
Lots of interesting battles took place and everything worked out. There was no element that showed up where we're like, oh man, if you do that because of that system, it's going to completely screw up this other part of the game that's being run by some other part of the system.
the only one that came up where it was kind of like oh that's funny what should we do with that was whether or not potions should be drank as a bonus action or not and it's because of a handful of characters are playing dnd 2024 that's kind of built around the idea that you can drink bonus potions with bonus action but level up advanced 5e doesn't let you do that so which one do we choose and we didn't even come to a conclusion about that and i don't know we could have a conversation but it really kind of didn't matter if i just said no it takes you in action they don't really care because dnd 2024 you have so many bonus action things you can do anyway nobody really matters whether you can drink it as an action or a bonus action
But that was the only thing where, are we going to make them live with their rules while everyone else, they get to benefit from this beneficial rule, but no one else does because they picked the wrong one. They picked a different one. What was interesting among the players is that they, in some cases, looked at their options and said, I think I'm going to stick with like level up advanced 5e.
So in one case, we have character playing a marshal. Well, the player is playing a marshal and the marshal has a big storyline going about their being a marshal. Marshal is kind of like the old school fourth edition warlord character. There really isn't a class in D&D 2024 that does that. You might pick one of the bards, like the College of War bard might kind of be like that.
But, you know, he liked playing the marshals. He says, no, I'm having fun and I'm going to stick to that. So he just stuck to it, right? Our rogue had a really powerful, like sniper rogue in A5E, but switched over to D&D 2024 and said, well, I lost a lot of power, but everything is more streamlined and I don't have to deal with combat masteries, which is kind of nice.
So they felt like it simplified their character build to go to D&D 2024, which is kind of interesting because D&D 2024 is certainly more complicated than D&D 2014 was, but it was still less complicated than Level Up Advanced 5e. And they're pretty happy with their character too. They're doing a lot of stuff.
They really like that rogue ability to be able to trade in your sneak attack dice to do other stuff. So that's fun for them. Our barbarian, we had a berserker who switched over to a barbarian for 2024 and now is playing the barbarian and also is enjoying it. And that's where we're seeing a lot of those weapon mastery things coming to play. He loves toppling and he loves vexing.
He's vexing and toppling all the time. And, you know, the toppling is as annoying as I thought it would be. But it's all right. You know, it's nothing more monsters won't solve. But that's been pretty interesting.
we have my my wife is playing a paladin and stuck to the paladin that she is playing in level up advanced 5e so that works we had a cleric who stayed in level up advanced 5e and i think during the session was switching over to dnd 2024 and at one point did the thing of oh i looked up the spell for dnd 2024 but i actually still in my level up advanced 5e character now my heels are doing twice as much as like you're gonna have to pick one of the other oh okay no problem i'll switch to the new one
So that was kind of funny. And we had one player who showed up and played a 2014 Bard because he had to kind of like whip up a character on the way. He wasn't there, couldn't level up. So he quickly made up a character in D&D Beyond and he made 2014 Bard and it played just like we would expect a 2014 Bard to play. So it was interesting to see which characters the players wanted to choose.
I think people, I think when it comes to comparing level up advanced 5e to D&D 2024, the power increase is certainly there because you get more feats with D&D 2024 and stuff like that. But there's also like the whole idea that weapon masteries in D&D 2024 are similar to the combat maneuvers in Level Up Advanced 5E. But in Level Up Advanced 5E, it's 40 pages of combat maneuvers.
And in Level Up in D&D 2024, it's a half a page. So it's much simpler to have these very effective weapon mastery things when you're doing it in Level Up and when you're doing it in D&D 2024. Nobody picked Tales of the Valiant because nobody had really started with Tales of the Valiant. And they were like, well, I'm interested to see what D&D 2024 is.
They also want an online tool and they really liked D&D Beyond. So for them to be able to, I think a big draw for them to switch characters was I get to use D&D Beyond and it's going to be easier for me to manage my character, which of course makes me grit my teeth, but you know, is what it is.
And so nobody picked Tales of the Valiant, but my, one of the players in there plays in my Sunday game, which is a full Tales of the Valiant game. Which means I'm now also seeing Tales of Valiant playing up against these other systems, which is also teaching me a lot. And same thing with Tales of Valiant.
The Tales of the Valiant's weapon properties is similar to the weapon masteries of D&D 2024, but much simpler to use. And in my opinion, way more balanced. That the weapon properties in Tales of the Valiant, you have to make choices about what to sacrifice in order to use those, unless you're a fighter, in which case you can kind of do it as a bonus action sort of thing.
And even that's a sacrifice because you're sacrificing your bonus action. So I'll tell you, this is like a tangential note compared to running all these characters at the same time is that I am now running all four 5e variants in all of my games now. I have a Tales of the Valiant game that's about to hit fourth level. I have a level up advanced 5e game that now also has D&D 2024 characters in it.
And I have a 2014 D&D game that I run every other week. So I'm seeing all of them side by side. And I can tell you as a DM, it really doesn't matter too much, right? Like I'm seeing slight changes and slight things, but the things that annoy me are still going to annoy me in any version of the game, which right now is Shield. Shield just bothers me. It's like a constant.
Everyone's casting Shield all the time and no one's getting hit and it bugs me. And we're going to talk about that a little bit later. The problem with shield, really the problem. But anyway, it's been very interesting to see all of these different versions of 5e. And it's been also particularly interesting in watching one game where we have multiple versions of characters at the same game.
That said, I don't like I did this because it's kind of how it worked out, right? I was originally going to start with just level up advanced 5e, but realized that some of my players were not having as much fun as they could have had if they were playing other systems. So I offered for them to switch systems.
If I were you, if I was starting a new game, I would probably have a conversation with the players about which system they wanted to use and then use that. And if I had a preference, I would kind of nudge my preference forward instead of actually running a mixed game. I think it'll be interesting for Gamehole Publishing and their organized play program where you can play any 5e.
That'll be kind of interesting to see it work. I don't think it's going to be a problem, but that's probably the only practical place where I think we're going to see this play out. Otherwise, I have a feeling that each group is going to pick the system that they want and they're going to play that. I don't think you're going to see a lot of mixed characters, but it could be from time to time.
You might say, well, we're all going to play level up advanced 5e because we like all that extra crunchy stuff. And then a new player is going to jump in. And maybe it's just easier for them to build a 2014 D&D character fast to get into the game. You can do that and it totally works fine. So that's one use case where that might actually take place.
Otherwise, I don't think it's very practical to expect groups to be running multiple different 5e characters at once. It just happened that I had this sort of natural experiment... To be able to do that and to see it. And I wanted to share the results from that because there has been all this talk about whether they are compatible or not.
And my argument is, honestly, when you squint, you can't really tell a difference that the difference between a one player who's running a Marshall and level up advanced 5e and another player playing a 2014 Bard and another player playing a 2024 Barbarian. is not really that different than having weird subclasses, right?
If you have one fighter with a subclass that's in Tasha's versus another fighter who's using the default subclass from 2014 D&D, there's also big differences. So we already see big differences between characters even within one system, especially if that system has a bunch of supplemental books.
Since we're already seeing those big differences, it's really not that big a difference to be seeing a character that's built from an entirely different core player's guide either. So that's been very interesting. And again, it's kind of neat. It's kind of interesting to see. And it kind of flows back into this idea. Two common ideas.
One is that I think we can embrace the great big mess that is 5E. I think that it being a beautiful mess is an advantage. I think that we get to kind of build it. And from this beautiful mess that we have,
I think we can build our own RPG that we want at our table by taking these supplements and choosing the things that we like, omitting the stuff that we don't, working with our players to make sure that they're having fun with it and run really fun games.
And I think that having all of these different variants, all of these different versions, having two different versions of D&D that are still both really popular
and having all of these supplemental versions like tales of the valiance and like level up advanced 5e and not even including all of the other supplemental stuff that exists for these games subclasses and you know new magic items and new subsystems that you can drop in that's all wonderful stuff and we can cherry pick the stuff that we want in order to tune the game that we like for the game that we want to run with our friends around the table and i think that's a huge advantage of this hobby
I love doing it and I think it's really fun. So I hope you found that talk kind of useful about what it's really like to see this stuff playing off one another. I don't know that there's that many groups that have watched characters from different systems playing together at the same table in tier two, right?
One of the crunchier tiers, especially when you throw in like level up advanced 5e, which not a ton of people are playing anyway. It's really interesting to see it all play together and I've enjoyed doing it and I'm really happy because my game has been a lot of fun.
A couple of shows ago, I started a series that will probably continue, which I'm calling The Dangers of the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide. The 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide, which came out about a month ago at this point,
is really clearly built for new dungeon masters to understand what a D&D game is, what their role in it is, what the role of the players are, how it plays out, how to prep sessions, how to run games, and all the different kind of tools that they might need in order to run their games. Way more so than the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide. The 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide is a good primer for new players
players of the game to understand what game mastering is like what dungeon mastering is like and and it seems like that should be the right place to do it because it's almost certainly going to be the most popular dungeon masters guide ever put out i mean the 2014 one has sold a lot so they'll have to eclipse those sales but i wouldn't be surprised if they do and so the and the idea that it's the second most popular dungeon masters guide next to the 2014 dungeon masters guide
you know they're both very popular so i think it's very clear that it is tuned for new dungeon masters and that new dungeon masters are most likely to pick up that game masters guy before they pick up any other i think that those are both safe statements and i think it's very good at teaching new dungeon masters a lot of the basics of running dnd
There's also a lot more to learn, and there's a lot of other material you can get from other books that are going to help you on your dungeon master experience and your path of dungeon mastering. But it is a really good start. However, a couple of places in that book have things that they do or that they say that I think are clearly going to be trouble for DMs who embrace them.
A couple weeks ago, I picked on crafting as one of the things that they – the crafting system in there is a very dangerous crafting system. And today, we're going to look at one of the new magic items that they included and why they could have been fantastic and instead they blew it because of one design thing that they made.
And those magic items, I believe that if those magic items drop into your campaign, if you decide to add those magic items to your campaign, you're going to regret it. You're very likely to regret it. And you will almost certainly regret it if you let players build those magic items because they are going to completely tune their character around a particular magic item.
And that is the idea of these inspelled items. So we're going to look at it spelled items. But first, I want to give you a quote, because the reason why I'm talking about this was a quote from one of our fine patrons of Sly Flourish, John M., who brought this up in our Discord server. And he gave me permission to quote this for the show today.
And the quote is, John M says, I know that Mike recently talked about my magic item creation rules in D&D 2024. Has anyone really taken a look at it? In general, I try to be the whatever makes you happy will make it work DM. I have one player in particular that I've played with for about 15 years now, and they're always good at finding the edge combos that really push the power curve.
So I know that I usually need to pay more attention when they mention wanting to do something. So for this latest campaign, they wanted to be a master crafter, which at first I was thinking about all the new specific artisan tools in the PHP 2024. But no, really, they just wanted to make up their own magic items. So that's when I had to dig into it.
All uncommon magic items cost 400 gold pieces, so they can be crafted for 200 gold pieces. And of course, my player was mostly interested in making items with the seven charges of the shield spell built in for 200 gold pieces. It's actually six charges, but... Slight correction, I believe. They spelled items, I think, of what they're talking about, and it was six charges.
But six charges of the shield spell built in for 200 gold pieces and giving those to all the other characters. My games tend to be a decent mix of exploration, social, and combat, so frequently we only have one to two combats between long rests, so those magic items would have meant plus five AC to all characters for almost all combats for 200 gold each.
Thankfully, the player ultimately agreed that magic item creation would not be a good concept for creating a full game for all, myself included. Definitely watch out for that part of the DMG. After that, I started looking towards other systems, and Tales of the Valiant magic item pricing seems way more reasonable.
I would say that even the trials and treasure magic item costs and crafting system from Level Up Advanced 5e is better than both of those. I think it really works. So what's funny is this is really three broken things happening at once, in my opinion. Broken, I know, don't email me about, oh, shield is totally fine. I don't know why you'd hate shield.
But it's always funny that people seem to really lean towards shield when it comes to spells that you want to put in whatever magic item you've got. Oh, bring a spell story and you can put anything. I'm going to put shield in it. Three copies of shield. So, uh, so there's three things going on here.
One is the magic item crafting rules in the 2024 dungeon masters guide is not great because it's too cheap and takes too little time in order to build it. Maybe if you increase the amount of money by 10 times, it would be good. And even then.
as I talked about in my previous show, the number one thing you want to do with the crafting system is make sure that any magic item they want to create requires a special component to create. That's really hard to find and treat that component as though it was the magic item, which means that put it at the end of a big quest. They have to go explore a big dungeon.
They have to go negotiate with demons from the forbidden zone, whatever, but you don't want them to be able to say, I'm going to make wands of magic missile all day, every day. And I'm just going to have tons of wands of magic missile. The crafting system is something you would definitely want to keep an eye out.
That is a big, in my opinion, a big problem of the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide that new DMs could find themselves trapped into. Once you start offering it to players, they're going to want it all the time. They'll be pissed off when you take it away. But then we come to inspelled weapons. So let's take a look. Let's take a look at inspelled weapons.
So there are three types of inspelled weapons that are available, or inspelled items that are available in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. Inspelled Staves, Inspelled Armor, and Inspelled Weapons. The difference between these, other than the fact that it is a staff and armor and weapons, is the types of spells that you can put in there.
So the Spelled Staff is the only item of the three that you can put any spell into. You can create it with any spell. The inspelled armor only allows for abjuration and illusion, but shield is included in that, which means you can make inspelled armor that has shield in there.
And the inspelled weapon is available only to put in conjuration, divination, evocation, necromancy, and transmutation magic in it. So you can't put shield on a magic, an inspelled weapon. These items would be absolutely fantastic, except for one thing. And that one thing is that they have six charges. Six charges of a spell is way too many charges.
For most sessions in most games, that means that a character could probably do that any time that they want. If you think about the number of total actions a character gets in combat, depending on how many battles you have, they probably don't get all that many. And if they have a single item, they have six charges. That means they can do that maybe half the time.
In some cases, maybe all of the time. It's not enough of a limitation and it didn't need to be this way. One of the things that kind of irritates me is it's so easy to make this thing good. And the way to make it good is it only works once per day that if you put a spell on here and if you if you limit this from from from six today to once a day, way better.
And all we have to do is look at Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 3 does this all over the place. All the items that you get, many of the items you get have a special ability to use it once per long rest where it fires it off and off it goes. And that works so much better because now you're giving an item to them that has a powerful spell on it. Even a shield, right? My loathed shield spell.
Let's say you get a suit, a breastplate, a special breastplate that's blessed by a particular god that lets you cast shield. It only lets you cast it once, which means for one round and throughout your whole day, you get shield for free. Once, one time. Way better than having it six times. Imagine being able to cast shield six times. And in some cases, it's not even just shield. It's other spells.
In this case, if you take this staff and you put fireball on it, it's an uncommon spell. spell or it's a rare spell but you can cast it six times right who wouldn't want to cast fireball six times now I guess a wand of fireballs can do the kind of the same thing so there's that but it's less times than the staff of fire can cast it and that's a higher rarity so
The real answer is if you're thinking about these inspelled weapons, limit them to one charge rather than six. And you don't even have to call it an inspelled weapon. You give it a fun name, you tie a spell to it, and the spell can be used once. And that is a really powerful and really cool, lazy trick for making a fun magic item.
Instead of just giving a plus one suit of studded leather armor, give them a plus one suit of studded leather armor that lets them cast invisibility once a day. That's not overpowered because they're not going to be invisible all the time. They're only going to cast it that one time, but it makes it really thematic and cool. And there's like a story behind it, right?
You can have a sword that can cast fireball once and that would be really powerful, but they're only casting it once. It's not totally broken, right? It's not something where they're going to be using it all the time. And this isn't even from like an overpowered standpoint of now it's hard to challenge characters. It also hurts the character, right?
Because every time a character has a new action like that, it dilutes all of the other things that they can do. So if you have a fighter and you give them a weapon that can cast Fireball six times, they're going to become Fireball guy. And now all those other abilities that they have as a fighter doesn't matter anymore because now they're the guy who casts Fireball all the time.
Why wouldn't you cast Fireball? You got it six times, right? It's Kona Cold, some of these powerful ones. You can put Kona Cold on there. Now you're Kona Cold, dude. So if you put a spell on there and you give it too many charges, that now takes up, that eats up all of the other abilities that character could have done in those actions by having better limitations on what they can do.
So beware, beware the unspelled items and instead use the very simple lazy GM technique of taking normal magic items and putting a single use spell effect on them that they can use once per day. The only alternative I'll mention are cantrips. It can be very cool to put a cantrip on a magic item that they can do whenever they want.
Because cantrips are intended to be used whenever they want, it's really not overpowering to give a character an item. And the one I was talking about with Michelle today was like a gauntlet. Let's say you have a special gauntlet that a character can wear that casts Firebolt. It's sort of like Boba Fett's rocket gauntlet.
right all it does is cast firebolt and even if it increases and your fighter's gonna love it because oh now i've got a really good ranged attack that i can use the wizard who can also cast firebolt isn't going to be that pissed off because what does he care that someone else is casting firebolt and firebolt is not so good that that fighter is going to say i'm just going to do firebolt my whole time no they're going to one up and do all their other fighter stuff because firebolt is limited in what it can do so cantrips are actually not so bad to put on a magic item and let them do it all the time and then you don't even have to use charges it's just they can just do it just like any other cantrip
And it's a fun way to take a character and expand them a little bit horizontally, giving them a new thing that they can do. But any spell from like first level or onward are intended to be limited. And if you offer six charges, you're essentially like giving people... Imagine having six extra spell slots on your spellcaster.
You know, what if you had a fourth level character and you're like, you pick up this new staff and it gives you six first level spell slots. You'd be like... Six. I've never I can't even get six first level spells ever. Right. You don't get that many spell slots. And this item gives you that kind of. And now, granted, it's a spell slot that's given away for one thing. It's a real problem.
So it's a real bummer because this was a simple thing to do. And the simple thing to do was just have the spell infused items where they can do the spell one time per day instead of six times per day. So it's a very easy fix. You can almost treat these items exactly as they are, only reduce it to a single charge that recharges on long rests and everything works fine.
But what I worry about are people that are brand new to the game that are picking up the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide. They're learning from this and they go, oh, that looks cool. I'll drop one of those weapons in or I'll let my players craft them.
And then you're stuck with our friend, our friend John, who has a player who's, we're going to give everybody a suit of armor that has six charges of shield on it. We're all plus five AC for the rest of the game. Oh my God, I'd quit. I wouldn't want to play that game, right? That would be so annoying. Just then saying I cast shield would be so boring.
I'd be like, just add, here's what we're going to do. You're going to add plus five to all your armor classes. You're going to take the item away. You're going to have plus five to all your armor classes. And behind the scenes, I'm going to add five to everybody's attack roll. And now we've got a D&D game, right? Beware in spelled items.
As in the game themselves, I believe they are going to be a real problem. So much better to just add a single spell. We now have multiple Game Master Guides available to us that we can use and learn from.
A few shows back, I talked about the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, and in the context of the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide, Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure, and Tales of the Valiance's Game Master's Guide.
And I came to a conclusion about them that so far I've continued to reinforce as I've spent more time with these books, as I've talked to people who've spent more time with these books. And as we I've read more about people's experiences with them on the Internet. And what it comes down to is that each of these books serves kind of different purposes and all of them are useful in their own way.
The 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide is really good to help new DMs understand what DMing is like, and it is in the best place to be able to teach that. Being that Dungeons & Dragons is by far the most popular role-playing game, which means this is likely to be the most popular Dungeon Masters Guide, it helping Dungeon Masters learn how to DM is really, really valuable.
However, it doesn't have a lot of tools for customization. It doesn't have a lot of tools for random tables. It has no random encounter tables. It's missing a lot of the stuff that you might want to use at your table to help you run your game.
It teaches you a lot about it, and it's got some tools, but there's a lot of stuff that they either gloss over or they make an oversimplified system for it, and they don't really dive in. It means that I don't think the Dungeon Master's Guide is going to have a role at the table Any more than the treasures that are in there to award to your players. And that's, it is what it is.
But the fact that it does that isn't bad. Trials and Treasure, Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure does a fantastic job of offering super deep encounter building tables. Tables to build random encounters and things like that. Traveling through environments. The best travel system that I found in an RPG that I really enjoy. And on top of a really good treasure system.
So there's a lot to love with the Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure. It is a favorite book of mine, and it is a book that I use at my table very often. I used it at my table just last night. The 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide didn't hit the mark as far as teaching people how to play D&D. Everybody kind of agrees with that. The designers agree with that.
People who have used it agree with that. I think it was unfortunately thrown out just because of that when it actually has a lot of value, mostly in lots of random tables to help you get ideas for your game. That was something that I looked in there and I really liked that that had. So there's a lot of stuff there.
in the 2014 dungeon master's guide including a lot of optional rules for ways to kind of change your game based on preferences that you've got that sort of stuff didn't a lot of those optional rules never made it into the 2024 dungeon master's guide and then we have the tales of the valiant game master's guide One big disclaimer is I wrote a good chunk, not a good chunk.
I wrote a chunk of the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide. So I'm absolutely biased in a lot of the stuff that I'm talking. I'm absolutely biased when I talk about the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide because I wrote a piece of it. I took a lot of stuff that I love about game mastering and I was offered the opportunity to put that into this book and I did so.
So you'll find things like secrets and clues, how to run hordes, the encounter building system that's in there, the advanced encounter building system that's in there. A lot of different sections that I was able to write for the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide. But I wanted to show specifically, I've shown Trials and Treasure before. We've talked about D&D 2024.
Everyone's generally, not everyone, but many people already have a good understanding of what's in the 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide. But I wanted to take a look at the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide in particular to show the kind of things that it has that can be valuable for your game. One nice thing, I know we talk a lot about the whole, oh, how much of a book can you show?
Tales of Kobo Press has given blanket permission to be able to show anything that we want to show in this book. Thank you for Kobo Press for making it easy for me to be able to show off all the stuff that's in this book.
One thing that should be very clear kind of upfront about the Tales of Valiant Game Master's Guide, and it's an advantage that it has over other games, but it does mean that this book is not directly, can't directly replace another Game Master's Guide.
is that treasure for tales of the valiant is actually inside the adventurer's guide so the player called the player's guide right the player's guide for tales of the valiant actually has all of the magic items that are in there which means that's many pages of text that the game master's guide for tales of the valiant can fill up with other stuff so it means that it's actually kind of a richer book because it doesn't have to spend a lot of space on on magic items it
It does have magic item random tables for rolling up magic items, but it doesn't have to spell out all of those magic items, which gives them 30 or 40 extra pages that they can spend on other things. And the primary area that Tales of the Valiant, that the Game Master's Guide for Tales of the Valiant spent that real estate was on optional rules.
Optional rules, advanced rules, subsystems, customization options. That's really where they focused a lot of their energy. And what's nice about that is that sort of thing doesn't exist in either the other two Game Masters Guide. 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide doesn't have a lot of optional rules.
Or optional subsystems that you're going to drop in and trials and treasure doesn't really do that either trials and treasure has its focus on specifically exploration and treasure being the main things that they focused on in that book, which means that among all of these books, we have a really rich amount of information that we can take into to fuel our game.
I will come to the problem, though, of how many Game Master guides do you need to buy and which one should you buy? And we'll come to that kind of at the end. The spoiler, I don't have a really great answer for you. The answer is it depends. But hopefully by understanding all of the different things that these books have, you can get them.
And sometimes you're able to get books on sale and things like that or get PDFs for a lot lower price. And I would recommend all four of these books, I think, are excellent books that are worth having in your collection. But right up front, you'll know that the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide does not have a full treasure list and instead has lots of other stuff.
So the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide does cover what is it like to be a game master. So this book is a pretty good introduction to game mastering. One feature it doesn't really have though, and honestly, none of the game master guides have, is like step-by-step instructions on how to prep a game.
Now, lucky me, I have a book that does exactly that called Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It's very popular. And I think the reason why that book is very popular is because there isn't anything like it. There isn't a lot of stuff out there that really gives you instructions on here's a way for you to prep your game.
The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide almost gets there, but most everybody else says, well, you can kind of do stuff. And in this book, they talk about it. What should you do? And they talk about assembling, how to find players and session zero.
and and you know what you want to talk about and then it has a prep prep a session right but it's pretty you know it's pretty vague and it kind of gets into the hey at the end make sure not to you know make sure to keep it down to one page of notes it does have sort of the planning right are the players going to learn anything new what encounters might come up where does the session start where will the session end hey those are all good things right and those are actually kind of close to the eight steps from return of lazy dungeon master
It does have things like, hey, note down your secrets and clues. By the way, we have a section on secrets and clues in here. Guess who wrote the section on secrets and clues? It has two thumbs. This guy. So there is information here. It's pretty brief, and it's not super specific about this is what your notes can look like. This is what they do.
The 2024 Dungeon Masters guide does have sections on this is what your notes can look like. But I think they're too vague. I think the notes that they put in there don't necessarily serve Game Masters. How to build encounters, they talk about that. Supplies and tools, that's very good.
So they talk a fair bit, and then, you know, ideas of virtual tabletops, battle grids, character sheets, all the kinds of things you need to run. What is it like to run a session? Who's the narrator? I think they, do they call him narrator? They call him game master because it's on the front of the book. So they definitely call him game master. What do you do? How do you manage pacing? Rule, cool.
So there's good information in here. about how to be a Game Master. More so than I would say the Trials and Treasure book has. And probably as good as what the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has. So I think that that's all good stuff. And if a new Dungeon Master picked up the Game Master's Guide, which I don't think is very likely.
I think it's probably rare for a new Game Master, for their first experience running a 5e game, to be running something that isn't Dungeons and Dragons. I don't think we could count on that.
But if it happened or if you're a GM and you're like, hey, I want to teach another GM something and you give them Tales of the Valiant, you know, then they're not going to be missing out because there's a lot of good stuff in there. Discussions about adventures, building adventures and campaigns, the elements of adventures, you know, all that stuff.
And then they have this kind of adventure setting. And this is where... This is the kind of stuff that I think is really useful for a book to be useful at the table.
And if you recall from the show that I did last week, I talked about what are the most common RPG products that GMs are really using at the table, not the ones that they like or bought or threw on their hard drive or have on their shelves, but the ones they actually use at the table. And seven out of 10 of the books, I'm making that number up, but it's pretty close to that.
Seven out of the 10 of the books were books filled with random tables to do stuff. Like Knave was on there. Worlds Without Number was on there. You know, Lazy DM's Companion was on there. The Monster Overhaul was on there. Books that are packed with random tables are the ones that people tend to use because they have very specific lists of things that you can use.
Not necessarily to roll on, but just to give yourself an idea about what's going on. So I think lists of random tables, I think, are really beneficial. It's good to have advice, but that advice, once you kind of read it, you kind of read it. And maybe it's useful to go back like once a year and go read it again.
But generally speaking, the stuff you're going to use at the table is crunchy bits of like adventure setting lists and things like that. The good news is that the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide has a lot of that stuff in it. The bad news is because it's a big book, you might need to go find it and you probably want to reference it somewhere.
You could even have a little index of useful tables on a three by five card and stick in the front. You could take a little sticky labels and label the parts of the book that you like that have tables that you find yourself going to again and again. So that's all sort of there. It's got a section on world building.
It talks both about top-down and bottom-up world building, the idea of spiraling out, which is my preferred one. That's the one I recommend in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Start where your characters are and build outwards from there. You don't necessarily have to fill out an entire world. But this one, one thing about Kobold Press is they definitely do a lot of world building kind of stuff.
There's books that they've written about world building. Wolfgang Bauer, the lead Kobold and chief of Kobold Press, made many big worlds for TSR and Wizards of the Coast. So you can you can tell that there's kind of a rich world building section here. It definitely gets into things like religion and governments and other things. And and here's your how do you incorporate secrets and clues?
Secrets and clues are stuck here in the world building section. But I think it's actually good in the adventure and session prep session. But it gives you an idea of the sorts of things that can matter about, you know, that can tell the character stuff that's going on in the world. When we have examples, this was a section that I wrote for this book.
Mapping the world and the scale of the maps, stuff like that in there. You know, all useful stuff. All things that, like, if you... You know, if you needed it, I do wonder at what point GMs feel like they've got a handle on this. They don't really need a book to tell them, you know, that's, that's a question.
But then, and that's, I think why trials and treasure, for example, doesn't cover a lot of this stuff is they're like, you've kind of got it. Although trials and treasure still has stuff like this. Gods and religion, divine models, that, that, that sort of thing. That's all in here. Then we get right into some of the optional rules that you wouldn't find necessarily in other books.
And that's in the chapter four, which they call Advanced Combat. One thing to note about the Game Master's Guide is it isn't a book that is required in order to run the game. They said that originally. That's why the original Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter only had the Player's Guide and the Monster Vault. Those are the ones you really need.
And because all the magic items are in the Adventure, the Player's Guide... That means you don't really need much else, which means instead of having a combat section that explains how combat works, they can jump right to an advanced combat section to offer different ways to run combat.
This is one, again, where I offered to them, hey, I would love to talk about running Theater of the Mind, and I would love to talk about zone-based combat as other options instead of just gridded maps. And they said, yeah. So I was able to write sections in here where they talk about using a battle grid, using Theater of the Mind, using abstract maps,
And one thing I really love is not only do they have these, like what the areas are and how many squares they have so that you can get an idea of how many, how many creatures fit in here. So useful diagrams, they have zone based diagrams that show like what a zone could look like. This is, you know, the best that I've seen in any game master's guide.
I would say that because I wrote it, but also it's nice to see like diagrams of this sort of thing. Discussions are like, here's a four zone battle grid and how that works. You know, it's got all sorts of stuff like this. Then we have these encounter templates. This is again, another section that I wrote in here. We have the encounter budget.
The encounter budget was a variant of encounter building, which is available in the monster vault, which I also wrote that not the monster vault, but I wrote the encounter building section from there. If you're familiar with the lazy encounter benchmark, it's the same. You're going to, you're going to be familiar with this. Only we looked at it a bunch of different ways.
So we offered up, one of the things that I wanted to offer up was encounter templates, this idea of can you build, you know, instead of having to go through a whole encounter building process, what if we built an encounter from a particular type and then understood generally what challenge rating monsters we should pick depending on like the tier of the game.
So we have bosses and bodyguards, bosses and minions, twin bosses, triple bosses, boss bodyguards and minions, hordes, rivals, and so on. And then the wolf pack. And it kind of gives you an idea. Here's how to compare challenge rating to character level when you're building any one of these different kinds of encounters.
So it's just another way of many to look at how to kind of build and organize encounters. This one from the composition of the monsters you're facing. And then you can kind of munch around with the challenge ratings of those in there. Setting in terrain. What are some of the things? I managed to get boot sucking mud into the difficult terrain thing where you're walking around. This is the reason.
Here's a fun. You want a fun little thing? This happened. This happened to a friend of mine in real life. We were kids. We were walking around and we found this big mud pit and he stepped into the mud pit in his big boots and he pulled his foot out and the boot was stuck in the mud and mud all went into it.
And then he tried to pull it out of the mud and it was so heavy because now it's filled with this liquid mud that it took like a ton of work for him to get his boot out of the mud. And meanwhile, his shoe is all dirty. I think it also happened in, I think you can find it in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
I think there's a scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where he loses a shoe inside a giant mud pit, but it actually did happen to a friend of mine. So I managed to get it here in the Game Master's Guide. So that's an enjoyable thing. So all different kinds of things, special combat scenarios, aerial combat, large scale combat. The chaos of combat, multi-phase combat.
This is a section I wrote about how to build combat where you have waves of encounters and how that works out. We have a whole section on that. And these are like advanced combat options, which is what the whole chapter is about. So I think that that's really useful stuff. Vehicle to vehicle combat, special scenarios, brawls and mobs.
There's actually, this book has two different ways to have mobs and minions, which is funny because we also have that in Forge of Foes where you have two different ways to treat mobs and minions.
where you can have like essentially a single monster that acts like a bunch of monsters or you instead run run minions in a fast way minions and hordes we have right here again another section that i wrote you can tell because it's all the stuff i loved writing about i had the opportunity to write in here adjudicating attacks and area effects against mobs and things like that so we have a whole good section in there and variant rules bloodied called shot expanding doom doom is their version of action point for or like a like advantage for monsters and they talk about and i've expanded even further if you if you i put out an article
This week about expanding Doom. I think it's coming out this week. I think that's right. You know, all kinds of different advanced options that are going on here. Advanced exploration. So one thing that I think the Game Master's Guide, the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide does not do very well is having a good system for exploration.
This is something that Level Up Advanced 5e's Trials and Treasure book does very well. I would say the D&D 2024 book also doesn't do it particularly well. But I think level up advanced five East trials and treasure does a very good job of what are the roles of the characters when they are doing it? How do you travel? You know, all that sort of thing.
And more people that are familiar with like old school adventuring kind of understand what's the process of travel through a wilderness, you know, going back all the way to like the old OD and D days. And unfortunately, this one mostly jumps on, what is it like to travel on multiple planes?
It jumps right into planar travel, which is actually similar to how the 2014 Dungeon Masters guy jumps right into, oh, you're building a world? Go straight to the cosmology. And you're like, how about in that the characters are staying out? Should I worry about that? Shadow corruptions, air travel. So there's stuff in there, but it's not...
It doesn't really get into the process of what overland travel is. Then we get into dungeons and we find some useful stuff. And this is an example of a really useful thing. I think the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has this. I think they might all have it. I don't know if Tales of Valiant has it. A key. And the value of the key is these are simple symbols.
that you as a DM can draw when you're drawing maps so that players can understand what you're drawing. And if we use a consistent key across all of them, then all of us can understand the kind of maps we're doing. And by the way, they're really simple, like the door, like the double door, like the secret door, right? There's all kinds of different things.
And these are the ones that you can directly use when you're drawing it out. An altar is just a box with two dots in it. A fireplace is just a box with a little area shaded in. Statues are a little star in a circle. Very common key that's been used again for 50 years, but it's really handy to have it in the book so that we can all get used to drawing these things.
Good for new DMs, good for old DMs. Some good stuff here on dungeons, including a lot of, this is where you get into random tables that are actually very useful about what you find in dungeons. Now, some of the tables they put in here, and different people have sort of different values from these. The idea of like random passage tables, it goes 30 feet and then has a door on the left.
I don't really find that particularly useful, but maybe it's because I just go steal Dyson maps. I think I would rather have a list of dungeons in the back of the book, the similar way to the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide has it, which I think is outstanding. Here's a whole bunch of different maps that you can use, and you can reuse them, and you can use them again.
And they are well-constructed, engaging maps that are designed well for a fun game, instead of kind of having a bunch of random tables to sort of... to stochastically build your dungeon out one passage at a time. I don't find that particularly useful, but room contents, the kind of stuff you find in a room are pretty good. Like 20 door descriptions.
I don't know if I need 20 different door descriptions because the door is often going to be based on what's the history of the dungeon itself. You know, I had a bunch of players going through a, a, a Kutoa lair, you know, a lightweight, possibly hollow door is not really that valuable in a Kutoa environment. Right. Yeah. Instead, I have to think about what doors are like in Quito environments.
Oh, they're covered in crustaceans or something like that. But then there are tables in here where they start to bring out the focus, right? They expand the aperture so that you start to see more things that are actually directly useful that you can drop in.
what are the purposes of the areas in different kinds of things you know what kind of rooms will you find in a dungeon or a death trap or a mine or a planar gate or a maze or a mausoleum these tables are actually in the 2014 dungeon masters guide as well and they're pretty useful there what are the different rooms that you might find in a dungeon this is useful because you can go find yourself a dungeon map and but you can decide like what kinds of things make sense for this room
that's the level of aperture i find most useful same with dungeon chambers right you can you can you know if you find a room and you want to figure out what that room is about you can kind of scan through this list and ask do those make sense i really like those same with like obstacles you know then you have like obstacles trap effects trick effects this is kind of fun you know and tricks again i think are another game masters guides as well
So a lot of different random tables on here. You have to decide if these random tables are at the resolution that you need. Is it too specific? Like container contents, bark, bones. Do I really need to have a random table that tells me the specific things that are in a container? That's a level of resolution that's too narrow for me.
The ones that I think are generally missing from a lot of books are the monuments, especially outdoor sort of things. What are like setting areas that you might find wandering around the outdoors? Nave does this well. My own books, of course, have it because I wanted it. So I wrote it. All kinds of things like this. Furnishings for different kinds of rooms are pretty interesting.
So there's a lot of random tables in here, I'll tell you that. And the random tables are the kinds of things that you might use at your table, depending on your need at the table. They have a section on puzzles, addition rule, weathers, traveling underground.
There's a whole section on social encounters, on how to run social encounters that has allies and antagonists and random tables to give you ideas for things. I haven't
i didn't dive too deep into it i don't think they have a big system for having for handling this kind of thing but it's pretty useful to say hey here's different different kinds of npcs quest givers that you might find hey look fantasy names real handy to have a bunch of lists of fantasy names that you could use surname you know masculine names feminine names and surnames that you could use always handy to have that that's probably like a page you want to bookmark because that's that's the kind of page you would use when you're actually running running a game
flaws wants personality traits and bonds good ways to build out your build out your npcs when you want them you might put a little bookmark on that one too if you're using them they have a section on factions and then we have like additional rule oh additional rules for it like attitudes starting attitudes this is something that dnd 2024 dove into a lot which is rolling your attitude checks and things like that but these are all kind of optional rules
Chapter seven, adventuring options, curses and diseases, all with, you know, their own sort of triggers and effects going on hazards, various hazards, crumbling monuments, arcane instability. This is a good one, you know, and this works well if you want to kind of tie it to an interesting monument that they have in the area.
It's a good way to kind of spice up an area that the characters are traveling through. Whole big section on traps, including how those traps work. Very common for most Game Master guides. A downtime section with their own crafting system. I'm not going to dive too deep into the crafting system.
This one, I believe this crafting system had the same kind of problem that the D&D 2024 crafting system had, which is there's no real way to limit an item by saying you've got to have this one specific component in order to build it, which ensures that you don't have players who are just like, I want to have 25 wands of magic missiles.
the only advantage is the items in tales of the valiance player's guide have a cost and the cost varies even within a level so it's not like every uncommon item is 200 gold so you know there's definitely there's there's there's there's a there's a system in place for that dread dread is kind of a new fun this is their version of the what was a very problematic section of madness in the 2014 dungeon masters guide has been switched over to dread i could have used more effects
you know this isn't a whole lot of effects i have 20 effects in the lazy dm's companion there are other ones too i i would love to have a d100 list of weird effects because dread i think is you can use for a lot of different things i have a section on firearms there's an expanded magic item section it doesn't really it has a handful of magic items but not a lot but mostly talks about custom building magic items and also artifacts that are available
The treasure system is one section of the Game Master's Guide that I wasn't crazy about. And it's because the way that they award treasure is not session-based, but is instead you build a set of parcels.
depending on the level of the characters so and you give away all of the parcels across that level band so there's a level one to three level band and the idea is like you build up your parcels ahead of time and then you dole out those pieces of that parcel across those levels i find it's much easier to break things down by session and instead i set up a i and this is what i do in the lazy in the my lazy random generator is
is I generate a session of treasure for each session. And sometimes they give it away. Sometimes they give half of it away. Sometimes none of it goes away. And that way I really have a stateless system for treasure. I don't have to worry about what I gave away last time. I don't have to worry about what I might give away next time.
I can instead just worry about the things that I might give away this time. And I like that better than sort of building out these treasure bundles. I didn't really try this too heavily though, but kind of looking at it, I knew like this feels like it's going to take extra work.
There's also little odd bits where it says things like two common magic armors, but there isn't an actual common magic armor list. You instead have to go look at the magic armor list and find the ones that are common and decide which one of those you want to drop in. Also for things like common magic weapons and common magic armors, there's only a couple, right?
which means you're almost always going to give away the same items for that because there's not a lot of common magic armor or common magic weapons. That was something that I found a little odd and didn't work particularly well. The rest of the tables that are here, though, you can use your own.
So what I say is for each session, roll up a common magic item, roll up an uncommon magic item, and roll up... There's faster ways to be able to roll up a per session base of treasure using the tables that are in the Game Master's Guide so that you don't have to kind of build it out parcel by parcel.
You can instead just build your own parcel for that session, give it away or don't, and then move on to the next session and not have to worry about it too much. Section on siege weapons and vehicles. They have, again, this is where we get into like different variants, like variants of initiative, passive initiative, team initiative, round-based initiative.
Again, something that the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide doesn't really offer, we can find in here. They have a section on skill challenges. I think anybody that's been following me knows how I feel about skill challenges. Homebrewers Toolbox. This is where you get into some really kind of fun stuff, right?
That talks about creating custom lineages, creating custom heritages, backgrounds, talents, subclasses. What are the things that you would want in order to build these kinds of things? Creating magic items. And this is for you to create magic items. Making new spells, making fabled magic items. Fabled magic items are a Tales of the Valiant thing of magic items that grow as the characters grow.
hazards monsters is an interesting one so they have a bunch of different things that you can do to help build monsters they have something that is missing from the 2024 dungeon masters guide which is a monster power by challenge rating chart now i've got one actually i'll jump to that but i'm going to jump back because these templates are really cool where's that monster challenge rating table
So they have this creature statistics by challenge rating table, so if you want to build a Tale of the Valiant monster at any given challenge rating, you generally get an idea of what kind of attack bonus it has, how much damage it should do, and so on. I'll tell you, these monsters hit like freight trains.
This table definitely goes above and beyond the damage output and the hit point allocation that we have in our Forge of Foes monster stat blocks. Still, really handy to have in here, and could be very appropriate for the power increase that you are going to find with Tales of Valiant characters. It also has a bunch of monster templates, which are cool. I would love more of these.
And it's got both monster templates by things like werecreature and elemental infused creatures, undead creatures, dragon liches. You can turn any dragon into essentially a dracolich. You can't call them dracoliches. You can call them dragon liches.
you know shadows other other kinds of creature types and they have these sort of templates that you can wrap around existing stat blocks that is really cool i like that that that that's something that again is sort of like the monster powers thing that we offer in forge of foes but if you want to make any creature into a zombie here's what you do to make a creature into a zombie mostly changing their certain attributes of their character but in some cases giving them a new a new ability else do they have
Then one definite thing that you can find in a Game Master's Guide that is going to help you use it more often at the table are random encounter tables. And the Game Master's Guide for Tales of Valiant has a whole set of random encounter tables in Appendix A for a lot of different environments. I kind of have two complaints. Complaint number one is I would love more of them.
In many cases, there's only about 12 options or so for any given tier for any given location. And two is I would love more locations. In particular, I would love like dungeons and crypts. Give me an area that's primarily undead and old ruins because, boy, people go there a lot. And I love sort of a more generic dungeon one of when characters are crawling through a dungeon.
Again, it could be many different kinds of places. I would love to have that. And instead, the closest we get with this is underground. They take an approach of spelling out a small scenario, which I really like, that instead of just saying dire wolf,
it actually says an arctic direwolf returns to its pack with its most recent kill when it noticed the pcs it drops its prey and growls ready to attack them the pcs can avoid combat if the wolf by succeeding a dc13 wisdom animal check or charisma i probably don't need the mechanic aspect of that you could just tell me a direwolf is bringing its recent kill back and growls growls if you know confronted and then as a dm i get to decide like what i'm going to do with that so these probably could be a
And I would love to see them have more of them. So I have more options when I'm looking through them. Because one problem when you have these larger descriptions of it, they tend to be more specific and then they don't fit the scenario that I'm particularly running. But I would have loved more of these. They're very usable.
And in some cases you can say, well, Badlands and Desert are kind of similar. So I'm going to roll on either one of those tables and see where they go. And they did break it out by tier. So you have tier one through tier four options.
different encounters that you that you have so again way more random encounter tables than the 2024 dungeon master's guide has that's for sure and i definitely have used these and i've enjoyed them so uh definitely a useful feature of the game master's guide anything else appendix b includes random campaign dressing this is again more random tables and and you know it's the kind of thing we want to look and remember that we have the npc generator table this
is a very very useful table to flavor anything it doesn't have to be just npcs it could be the magic items that you pick up who owned it previously it could be you can use these tables for a lot of different things you know professions are really useful you know it's got this like city city-based encounters and this is where i'm saying you know this little encounter table is is actually pretty useful i'd love i'd love to have more encounter tables like this
You know, my old magical curios, a nice list of that. Trinkets and treasure, really, really handy, really handy list. Like this, right in the back of the book, but these are the kinds of tables that you might actually grab and use at your table. You know, within a castle, environmental encounters. And then we've got fantasy inspiration.
We've got pages and pages of different inspiration to help fuel your mind for fantasy stuff. and then an index. So that is the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide. I think it's a really excellent guide. I think it serves a very solid purpose. I think it is a book that you can both pick up and read and learn from and pick up interesting ideas.
It has lots of different options to drop into your 5e game, whatever kind of 5e game you're running, and a lot of useful tables that you can use you can use at the table itself. So I think it's, I think it's very good. I like it.
One thing I'm really looking forward to is when they make a pocket version of this, I have the pocket versions of the player's guide and a pocket version of the monster vault. And I really want a pocket version of the game master's guide so I can carry around all three books for tales of the Valiant in my backpack. And it would be very nice for Mike Shay's back.
So I hope, I hope to see a tales of Valiant game master's guide pocket edition soon. 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, you can subscribe to the Sly Flourish newsletter. It's the absolute best way to find out information about what I'm doing.
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