The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
The End of One D&D – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 01:20 D&D & RPG News: Kobold Press Black Flag SRD in Markdown 04:20 Kickstarter Spotlight: Creating and Adapting Monsters for Shadowdark 06:11 D&D & RPG News: Mike Mearls on Dungeon Craft 08:03 Commentary: How Bonus Actions Changed 14:31 Commentary: GM-Focused Products as Advanced Software for Advanced Users 21:06 Commentary: Experiences with the D&D 2025 Monster Manual Adult Black Dragon 29:31 DM Tip: Legendary Resistance Alternatives 39:51 Commentary: The End of One D&D 49:02 Patreon Question: Running Frostmaiden with Shadowdark 51:58 Patreon Question: Additional Roles for Exploration 53:38 Patreon Question: Did I Negate Character Abilities and Take Away Player Agency? 56:08 Patreon Question: Should I Kill Shadowdark Characters with Big Backstory? 58:38 Patreon Question: Is Your YouTube Channel Dying? Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Kobold Press Black Flag SRD in Markdown Creating and Adapting Monsters for Shadowdark Kickstarter Mearls on Dungeoncraft
Chapter 1: What is covered in today's Lazy RPG Talk Show?
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to look at Black Flag's system reference document, Kobol Press's system reference document for Tales of the Valiant released in Markdown. We're going to look at the Creating Monsters for Shadow Dark Kickstarter. Mike Merles was recently on Dungeon Craft talking to Professor Dungeon Master. We're going to dig into some of the things they talked about.
I'm going to talk about my personal experiences having run a 2025 Monster Manual Adult Black Dragon versus my 9th level group. We're going to talk into Legendary Resistance alternatives today. Alternatives for Legendary Resistance. We're going to talk about the end of 1D&D. What is the end of 1D&D? Have we reached the end of 1D&D? I believe we have. We're going to dive into that.
And we're going to cover more questions from the Patreon Q&A all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show. I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk to you about all things in tabletop role-playing games. The Lazy RPG Talk Show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of
Awesome tips, tricks, and tools like the 5e Artisanal Monster Database, the Random Sly Flourish Random Generator, the Dyson Commercial Map Tool, virtual tabletop backgrounds for Dwarven Forge, and all kinds of other stuff that you get. You get a ton of stuff for becoming a patron of Sly Flourish. But most of all, what you get is to support me to help put on shows like this.
To the patrons of Sly Flourish, thank you so much for your outstanding support. There has been a lot of drive and interest in getting more RPG products available in Markdown. A lot of times because people are starting to use Obsidian to do a lot of game planning and to organize their stuff. Obsidian loves Markdown.
If you want to know more about Obsidian, check out obsidian.md, I think is the name of the site. It's a tool that you can have on your phone or your computer. Helps you keep track of notes, but it keeps it all in a very standard and easy to use format called Markdown. If you want to learn more about Markdown, you can Google Markdown and look into it.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Kobold Press Black Flag SRD in Markdown?
But Markdown is a very simple syntax for storing information. A lot of RPG products are now starting to do stuff in, I wouldn't say a lot. There are several RPG products that are starting to do stuff in Markdown, including a lot of the stuff coming from Raging Swan. This is the first publisher I have seen that was releasing stuff in Markdown. Got me excited about it.
So I'm going to start releasing stuff in Markdown. Well, one of the new things we have is the Black Flag System Reference Document. The Black Flag System Reference Document is kind of the core engine behind Tales of the Valiant.
And there is now available on GitHub, a Black Flag SRD that includes all of the information, including like monsters and spells and spellcasting in Markdown formats, which makes it very easy to read and to drop into your notes, convert to other formats. You can turn it into an e-book. You can do all kinds of stuff with it. So works really well for mobile devices.
It makes the text available on lots of different platforms. So it's very cool to have this in Markdown. You can literally just download it and stick it into your Obsidian Vault.
and view it in obsidian so you can keep all of your markdown all of your black flag srd material which includes like a lot of their monsters a lot of their spells a lot of other stuff a lot of magic items available in a very easy to use markdown format so if you want to learn more about this if you want to see the black flag srd in markdown you can find a link down in the show notes i thought that was really cool
The 5.1 SRD that Wizards of the Coast released under Creative Commons license is also available on Markdown. And I think over on my GitHub repo, we have the Level Up Advanced 5e system reference documents converted over to Markdown as well, which means you have a lot of 5e material available in Markdown that we can keep in our Obsidian notes.
So you can copy and paste spells, copy and paste monsters. You can sort and search easily. You can look things up on your phone really easily. Really nice to have stuff in Markdown. I think Markdown is a fantastic format, and I would love to see more RPG material made available in Markdown. One of the things I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks is getting City of Arches in Markdown.
So the new book that I'm putting out is available in PDF, but we are going to be adding a Markdown and an EPUB version so that you can make a mobile-friendly version of City of Arches. I'm going to be working on that over the next couple of weeks. And then that will be released to everybody who had previously purchased City of Arches.
Everybody that backed City of Arches through the Kickstarter, everybody will be getting access to the Markdown and EPUB versions of City of Arches. It's probably going to take me a couple of weeks to get it done though. It's going to be, you know, take some work. It's 160 page book I got to convert. So, but I'm excited to do it. I'm happy to do it.
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Chapter 3: How can you create and adapt monsters for Shadowdark?
So it is a small zine that is going to have advice for how to convert monsters or build monsters for your Shadow Dark game. When I saw it, I saw a preview of it, I heard about it, and I was like, ooh, this seems like Forge of Foes for Shadow Dark. And he liked that quote, and I think that quote is available on his site. So it is a very, very cool preview.
I think it's going to be an extremely useful book for Shadow Dark, really good tinkerer's guide for Shadow Dark.
and i'm very excited for it and happy to promote it here on the show i did not receive i think i got a free copy of the book like the current state of the book but i didn't get like you know a bunch of free stuff to preview it i think it's really cool and i think you should check it out so that is the creating monsters for shadow dark if you are shadow dark gm i think you're absolutely going to want this book i think i'm definitely going to pick up
I don't think I've backed it yet, but I'm definitely going to back it at the physical one. I want to have a copy of the booklet, the zine physical. Oh, I did. See, I already did back it. Hey, look at that. I did back it. 12 bucks. 12 bucks is very reasonable price for a small booklet that will help you build your monsters for Shadow Dark, which I think is a very useful thing to do.
So that is Creating Monsters for Shadow Dark available on Kickstarter. You can find a link down in the show notes to back that fine Kickstarter. Mike Merles was over on Dungeon Craft. Dungeon Craft by Professor Dungeon Master, big YouTube channel.
I had a chance to have breakfast a couple times with Professor Dungeon Master while we talked about all kinds of things involved in the industry and stuff like that.
And he had an interview with Mike Merles, the lead designer of the original 2014 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, who also worked on 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, now independent, working on his own RPG, and also works over at Chaosium, and talked to him about a bunch of things. And I thought it was an interesting interview. Some of the...
stuff he talked about was, you know, I don't want to say like clickbaity, but like, I don't know why we still need to talk about it or not. And that was like, was fourth edition. So one question that professor dungeon master asked him was, was fourth edition designed around world of Warcraft?
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Chapter 4: What insights did Mike Mearls share on Dungeon Craft?
Well, we've already seen other designers and lead designers, Rob Hainso talk about the connections between fourth edition and world of Warcraft and stuff like that. And all it does is cause arguments with people who love fourth edition. and say, I don't want to, you know, I don't, I don't think that's true.
It's like, well, two lead designers and not tell you it's true, but it's also not like the design of fourth edition is exactly that of mirroring world of Warcraft. But there was a drive from the executives of wizards of the coast to say, we want you to bring world of Warcraft people over to dungeons and dragons. We are interested in capturing that market.
We want to dive into digital and we want a game that supports that. So, but who cares, right? The answer is fourth edition had happened. It is the way it is. It's out there. If you love it, you love it. No one, no one can take away the fact that you love fourth edition.
If you love fourth edition and nor is it up to you to try to convince everyone else that fourth edition is the best thing ever if they don't believe so. So it doesn't really matter, right? It's out. You can go get the PDFs. I have the PDFs of fourth edition. I have the physical versions of fourth.
I have a whole shelf of fourth edition D&D stuff over there because fourth edition is really where I dove into becoming more than just a player of Dungeons and Dragons, but an actual person writing books and stuff like that. He also talked about bonus actions, which I thought was really interesting. Mike Merles talked about bonus actions.
And one of the things about bonus actions that is, I think, really kind of interesting to understand and think about and think about how the approach towards bonus actions has changed in fifth edition D&D since it first came out until today, specifically when you look at D&D 2024. And what Mike described is that bonus actions were a limitation, not an expansion of actions in D&D.
It was not intended that bonus actions become another action type that you kind of do on top of actions. Instead, bonus actions were a way to limit the number of extra things you could do on your turn as part of your action. So it's kind of a weird thing to think about, but think about it this way.
You wouldn't want to play a game where the warlock could only do hex on their action and they couldn't do anything else other than hex or hunter's mark, right? Like a ranger throwing hunter's mark on a creature should not be something that takes an entire action to do. They should just be able to do it.
So the, but the problem is if you have somebody who's like a multi-class warlock ranger, that means theoretically they could do both of those things. If you tie it to an action, if you say like, as part of your action, you can cast hex. Well, if you can also say as part of your action, you can cast Hunter's Mark. That means you could do both.
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Chapter 5: How have bonus actions evolved in D&D?
No, I'm good. I don't have anything right now. They would stop and pause the game to look for whether or not they had something they could use as a bonus action because it's optimal to be able to use it. If this is a resource that your character has available to you, you want to be able to use it.
Then as the game expanded, as you saw Xanathar's Guide and Tasha's come out, they started to put more bonus action stuff in there. More characters had it. You also had every character had access to some bonus actions like attacking with an offhand weapon was something every character could do. So technically everyone had a bonus action.
But then I played, for example, in a game with my friend Chris Ran, and I played a Rune Knight. And I'll tell you, I had more bonus actions than actions. I had more things I could do in my bonus action than things I could do in my action. And that was the first time I looked at it and looked at bonus actions and realized bonus actions are just actions. They're as big as actions.
They can do things as big as actions. They're just not actions. You basically have two actions that you can do on each turn. With a set of things that count for one type of action and a set of things that count for another. But it's not any smaller. It's no longer like an optional sort of add-on thing. They are big chunks of characters. And then we come to D&D 2024.
And in D&D 2024, not only do we have actions and bonus actions and lots of stuff you do in your bonus actions. Now we have a bunch of things that are more similar to the original idea of things that stack onto your action that don't take anything to use. The example is the paladin that I played. I played a seventh level paladin.
I was an Oath of Glory paladin, and I would have an attack, and then I could, as a bonus action on a hit, which is more like a reaction, but whatever, I could then smite, right? Which makes sense, so that now they're limiting smite as a bonus action, again, using that resource up by saying, oh, you can't smite on your second attack because you already used your bonus action. So I would smite,
But then the smite could also trigger another ability that let me use my channel divinity for free that then cast, what is it called? Inspiring smite. And inspiring smite let me then pull up a bunch of temporary hit points and then divvy it out to all the people around me. That was all part of my attack. Now, granted, the bonus action was the smite part of it.
So technically the smite, the channel divinity, and the inspiring smite was all my bonus action, kind of. And then I get to sap on top of that because that's my weapon mastery and the weapon mastery does not take any kind of action to do.
So I had like five things that I was doing on a single attack because they wanted players and characters to be able to do all of those things without necessarily having to only pick one of them. It's a lot of stuff.
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Chapter 6: What are GM-focused products and who are they for?
And I think it's interesting when you look at Game Master guides, as an example, if we look at the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, the Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure, and the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, we can kind of see a difference in design philosophy that I think if you look at the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, and keep in mind, I wrote part of it.
I was commissioned to write for the Game Master's Guide, so I'm definitely biased in my understanding of the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide. But I think that that book, more than the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, is a book written for experienced game masters to help give them tools to change their game, modify their game, and build their game in lots of different directions.
And if we look at the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide, they stepped away from a lot of that stuff. For example, a big one is there is no monster statistics by challenge rating list. There's no real way to build a monster from scratch using the 2024 Dungeon Masters guide.
They have some guide that's about re-skinning them, but we have nothing about what the difference is between a legendary monster and a normal monster. We can look at the books and reverse engineer the fact that legendary monsters seem to be doing more damage than normal monsters at the same challenge rating. I think that's really good, but... but I'd sure like to know what went behind it.
And it would be interesting to see some actual tables that they use in order to benchmark their own stuff. There's very few house rules in the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide. There were a bunch more house rules that existed in the 2014 Guide. One argument could be lots of people didn't use them, so why publish them? That's certainly an option.
But another one is sometimes reading those rules gives you ideas about other house rules you could put in play, and it gives you really good thoughts and advice for why you might want to have house rules. So I look at it and say the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide is really more of that line of expert software written by expert users than the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is.
The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide is still a really, really good book. It's fantastic for new game masters. I think it does a really good job of explaining how the game works. It gives a lot of stuff in there. But there's a lot of sections that are in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide that I think could have been replaced with more usable tools to help us run our game.
I expect, and I was doing it just an hour ago, I'm going to be able to use the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide pretty much any session that I'm running where I have that book in front of me because there's so much material in there I can dive into and look from, from random encounter tables, monster building guidelines, encounter building design stuff, optional rules, doom points.
There's all kinds of stuff that are in there that I can sort of reference and go back to regularly. I have a feeling, other than magic items, I don't know how often I'm going to need to go back to the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. They don't have tables for building dungeons out. They don't have ideas like what kind of chambers might exist in an old shrine.
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Chapter 7: What are the experiences with the D&D 2025 Monster Manual?
I think vulnerability to fire is so powerful that if they don't have extra hit points to account for that vulnerability, they're going to drop, even if they have resistance to bludgeoning and piercing. So your mileage may vary, but I would keep your hand on the dial. But that worked really well. Then I ran a big battle where they fought two stone giants and one adult black dragon.
But we'll start with the stone giants. So the stone giants are CR sevens, 126 hit points, a little bit below the 140 AC 17. So pretty hard to hit two attacks plus nine to hit 22 bludgeoning damage. That's a good pile of damage. They could throw boulders for 15 damage each.
So not quite as much damage, but you know, now there's a reason why you would want to stay away from them rather than get on top of them. And then they had the deflect missiles trait, which did come up in play. They were happy and the players were interested to see how that played out.
One thing I did with the stone giants, and I'll get into this for the encounter overall, is I threw in another idea from Tales of the Valiant called doom points. In my game, I call them dreadful, dread, dreadful incursions. No dreadful, dreadful blessings.
So dreadful blessings are essentially replace legendary resistance and let me do other things other than just automatically saving on a saving throw. And in this case, I use dreadful blessings in order to drain the life from the stone giants and give it to the adult black dragon, which you'll see.
So I wouldn't say that it was a pure vanilla, perfect scientific experiment running these monsters, but I did get to see the stat blocks run and I thought the stone giant worked really well. The adult black dragon also works really. CR 14, good pile of damage, right? Acid breath for 54 points of damage.
I really like the rend attacks, which do, you know, 17 damage on a hit, 13 plus four acid damage. They do three rend attacks and then can do three additional rend attacks as legendary actions if they want to. I loved the cloud of insects was really cool. Like cloud of insects uses one legendary action, DC 17, 22 poison damage and disadvantage on saving throws to maintain concentration.
Fun way to break concentration, right? So then I got to the things I didn't like. And it turns out I was right, at least for me, right? I really hate it when you bury your effects under a spell. And in this case, frightful presence. The dragon uses spell casting to cast fear. And I was like, fear, that's probably like one target. I'll just do the thing. Oh, it turns out, no, fear is a cone.
I had to go look it up in the player's handbook in order to figure out what fear did. That kind of sucked. I wish you'd just tell me what to do in here. Don't make me go look it up. Too late. We already have the book. It already was the way it is. So this worked very well, but 195 hit points is actually not nearly enough hit points against six ninth-level characters.
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Chapter 8: What are alternatives to Legendary Resistance in D&D?
And every time you hit him, one of those glyphs disappears. So now you have kind of an interesting way to show what the legendary resistance is. Maybe they are a necklace with three glyph stones. Maybe there are three ion stones that are spinning around their head. Maybe they've got carved scales. Maybe they've got shields of protection that shatter every time one of them is destroyed.
Try to imagine what a legendary resistance looks like in the world. And that way your players can see what they're doing in the world itself. That's kind of a fun way to do it.
The designer, original lead designer of the 2014 version of D&D, Mike Merles, had an interesting one that he brought up, which was the idea of instead of legendary resistance, what if a legendary monster auto-saves on all saving throws until they're bloodied? I.e., for the first half of the battle, you have to inflict damage to them. They're going to automatically save on all their effects.
But then as soon as you get them down to bloodied, now they're making saving throws like normal. It was interesting. I talked about this in the Sly Flair's Discord server and got pushback on that idea saying it was too arbitrary. I don't know that it's any less arbitrary than normal legendary resistances are.
I don't think it's actually any harder for the players either because, again, my players often destroy a monster before it even uses all his legendary resistances. So if it's going to have all of these legendary resistances to save anyway, why not just have it automatically save every time until it's bloodied? And now the strategy for fighting monsters is different.
I brought it up with my group and they were kind of like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. We'll try that. So I might throw that on some boss monster one time that instead of having legendary resistances, they have this auto save, you know, automatically succeed on saving throws until they're halfway down. Again, I would tell my players that this is going to happen.
I would not surprise them by this. I would explain that that's how it's going to work so that they can tell that that's going to work. Don't try to hide the strategy. So anyway, I thought that was an interesting way. Now, another one, which I talked about when I was talking about running my Ancient Black Dragon is Doom Points. So Doom Points is a feature of Tales of the Valiant.
Tales of the Valiant has many really cool ideas that you can bring into any of your 5e games. The luck system replacing inspiration is one of them. The other one is Doom Points. I have referred to these when I was testing them myself as dreadful blessings, but you can call them whatever you want. Doom points is fine. Dreadful blessings is also fine.
The concept here is that in different encounters, you have these doom points. You have a number of doom points that are based on like the CR of the encounter. But another way to handle it is to basically replace legendary resistances with doom points. So doom points can do what legendary resistances do. You can turn in a doom point in order to automatically save on a saving throw. You might fail.
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