The Lazy RPG Podcast - D&D and RPG News and GM Prep from Sly Flourish
The Trouble with Crafting – Lazy RPG Talk Show
Mon, 14 Oct 2024
D&D and RPG news and commentary by Mike Shea of https://slyflourish.com Contents 00:00 Show Start 02:17 D&D & RPG News: Call of Cthulhu Humbled Bundle 04:40 Sly Flourish News: City of Arches Key of Worlds Scenarios for Hero-Tier Subscribers 12:28 Product Spotlight: Dread Thingonomicon Markdown for Obsidian 16:19 Sly Flourish News: Lazy GM Reference Guides in Markdown for Obsidian 20:23 Sly Flourish News: Sly Flourish 2025 Calendar! 22:00 Commentary: The Trouble with Crafting Systems in 5e 36:37 DM Tip: Advanced Random Encounter Tricks 49:46 Patreon Question: Adding Subquests and Managing Levels with Campaign Arcs 54:04 Patreon Question: Keeping Combat Descriptions Flavorful 57:17 Patreon Question: Designing a Heroic Shadowdark-Style Game Links Subscribe to the Sly Flourish Newsletter Support Sly Flourish on Patreon Buy Sly Flourish Books: Call of Cthulhu Humbled Bundle Dread Thingonomicon Dread Laironomicon Lazy GM Resource Docs likewise have Obsidian versions Lazy GM's Resource Document Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder Resource Document Crit-Tech's Lazy GM Documents on Github (including Obsidian Markdown versions) Sly Flourish 2025 calendar
Today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show, we're going to look at the Call of Cthulhu Humble Bundle. We're going to look at the City of Arches Key of Worlds Adventure Paths, a new reward for hero tier patrons. Dread Thingonomicon, which was on sale last week, has a really awesome set of markdown files that you can drop right into Obsidian. We're going to talk about that.
I'm also going to talk about the Lazy GM resource documents, likewise have Obsidian versions. We're going to show those off. We're going to dive into the tricky problem of item crafting and what's going on with item crafting and why everybody wants it and why it's really hard to implement well. We're going to talk about advanced random encounter tricks.
We're going to combine a bunch of different random encounter tricks that I've talked about before into one talk to dive into some of the great tricks that you can do with random encounters to make them really, really useful. And we're going to cover the first batch of questions from the October 2024 Patreon Q&A, all today on the Lazy RPG Talk Show.
I'm Mike Shea, your pal from Sly Flourish, here to talk about all things in tabletop role-playing games. This show is brought to you by the patrons of Sly Flourish. Patrons get access to all kinds of cool tools, tips, tricks, ways to improve your fantasy RPGs, things that you can directly use, all different kinds of stuff.
They also 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 support.
To give you an idea of the example of that support, my wife and I, because we have things like Patreon that are able to help us with our funding, we were able to give out about $13,000 worth of material to school programs, after school programs last year. Unfortunately, all of our sponsorships are filled at this point. Hopefully, we'll be able to do it again next year.
But we definitely like to give back to the community overall, in particular to those who are running programs for kids after school, whether they are at libraries or whether they are other community programs or schools, we like to give back.
We were able to give both cash and products to these groups for a total of about 12, I think it's about 12 to $13,000 that we were able to give because of the outstanding support that we get from patrons. So patrons, thank you so much for your support. And we are very happy to be able to take some of that support and give it back to communities that are running role playing games for kids.
kids all over the world. Boy, Humble Bundles, man. So we talked, I don't even remember what it was, but one point that I'd like to make for the fine, distinguished, astute RPG customer, the best way to get great value in tabletop role-playing games is bundles of holding and Humble Bundles.
If you want to fill up your library with awesome digital role-playing game products, your digital library with digital role-playing game products, They have outstanding deals. The best deals you're going to find are on Humble Bundle and Bundle of Holding. As an example, we have the Call of Cthulhu Humble Bundle, which is currently available. $25 gets you 26 products.
That's less than a dollar per product. That includes...
a whole slew of call of cthulhu stuff now i don't play call of cthulhu i've played one or two times i know about it i enjoy it i like it i think it looks cool but boy 25 bucks including the the core rule books and the starter set plus a whole bunch of other accessories for this cost is just too cheap to not jump on and i did and i and i got it
An interesting thing about this humble bundle is it gives you access to it through DriveThruRPG. So when you're done, you will get a link that links to the bundle on DriveThruRPG, which then adds all of these products, plus all of the accessories for all these products, into one big bundle.
And I recommend using the DriveThruRPG download tool to get it, because otherwise you'll be sitting there all day clicking download. And instead, I was able to get a nice Chaosium folder that had all of the RPGs underneath it with all of the accessories for it.
So it's really funny that the hardest part about a bundle like this is figuring out how to download and organize the vast amount of stuff that you get for $25. Really outstanding deal. You can pick that up on Humble Bundle. There's a link down in the show notes. Really, really cool stuff. And I haven't even opened them yet. I'm like, oh, I'm definitely getting it.
But I want to pick up the starter set. I want to open through it. And even if I just enjoy the artwork. Or the style. They also have some solo gaming that you can do with this stuff. I noticed that in some of these has some solo gaming ideas about decisions that you make and stuff like that. That could be a lot of fun. So it looks really, really cool. Check that out.
That's the Call of Cthulhu bundle from Chaosium available as a Humble Bundle. Fantastic deal. $25 for 26 books. City of Arches is going really, really well. All of the material is now sitting over with Scott Gray, who I've worked with for decades now, or more than a decade now. Awesome, awesome dude. And he is putting it all together into our final draft manuscript.
We're going to have a manuscript that's going to have all of the art and all the layout and all the text. We're still going to go through another editorial pass on some of it. We've already gone through editorial passes on most of it, probably 120-ish of the pages or so, 120, 130 pages. I've gone through multiple edits.
But we just did a bunch of new sets in order to get it to the full 160-page page count. We found out we had some extra room in there for some other stuff, so I wrote up some new stuff and put it in there. And that's great. And then we commissioned some new art to fit those new stuff, including I think there's a new – yeah, we have a new adventure scenario in there.
that had multiple maps and art and everything like that. So that's going to be really cool. But what happens while I am, you know, getting City of Arches put together is my number one goal right now for me and the Sly Flourish Empire. But I have downtime. Sometimes I have time where I'm like, it's out, right? And it's over on Scott's desk, not my desk. And so I've got time to do other things.
And I was like, I wonder what I could do. And I was like, you know what I could do? So I've been running City of Arches for my home group. And I've been running the Key of Worlds adventuring arc. The Key of Worlds campaign arc that's inside City of Arches, it's also available in the free sample. And I was like, I've started filling out what these parts of the arc look like.
What if I made those not adventures exactly, but adventure scenarios? One of the great things that Patreon allows me to do is experiment with stuff. I can try stuff out. And some of those experiments turn into really great things like the Lazy DM's Companion. Some of them turn into things like the City of Arches. I don't know if this next thing is going to turn into anything like that.
I kind of feel like it's probably not going to be a new big book or anything like that. It's very likely that this would only be a Patreon thing. But what I wanted to try my hand at is really simple adventure scenarios that are designed around the ideas of the lazy dungeon master that give the GM the freedom to grab it and run with it and build it out and fill it out on their own.
So I'm trying this out as an experiment. And the experiment is going to be five adventure scenarios that cover first to fifth level. They cover the first tier of the Key of Worlds adventure arc. They are not a series of adventures in a linear path. They sort of branch out a bit, and there's going to be one scenario for each part of the branch, so you can pick which ones you want to do.
But then at the end of it, that ends kind of the first big arc of the City of Arches Key of Worlds campaign arc. The first one of these is already available to patrons of Sly Flourish called the Scroll of a Crave. And the Scroll of a Crave is the first part of the Key of Worlds adventure arc, the scenario arc. And it's designed to work with any of the 5Es.
It's designed for you to bring your ideas to it and fill in a lot of the pieces of it, which is why I have this little breakout box about it. It's not a typical adventure. This isn't an adventure that you buy where it describes all of the scenes that go on and all of the different NPCs and stuff that are in that scene and how it plays out.
Instead, it breaks all of those things up the same way that we break things out in... Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master into key components. There's some different components in here that the steps don't have that you need, like a summary and like an initial description and history and things like that to get you on the right page.
But it does have, as you notice, like secrets and clues, key NPCs, the adventure hooks, which is sort of like your strong starts, different random encounters that might occur in the location. I have a whole section here for DC damage and traps so you can drop in your traps when they make sense and when the pacing is right. Different locations, treasure, and then further adventures.
So I'm trying to keep to a particular format for these, a particular set of sections that you can find. And as you can tell, it's short. Scroll of a Crave is three pages. A lot of them are four pages. I've now got first drafts of I think all of them. All the first five, and they're all about, I think one of them might be five pages.
One of them is a little longer because the location is a little bit bigger. But generally speaking, they're like three to five pages. And the goal is to make them very easy to run, print off, run, and you bring your ideas to it. So you have secrets that you can drop in different locations, NPCs that you might want to pay attention to, three different adventure hooks to get you into the adventure.
And the idea here is if you like just one of them, you should be able to run that standalone. Even though they're kind of intended to be run as a series, you don't have to run them as a series. And instead, it could be just a simple quest that you pick up that just puts you into the next part of the line.
We have encounters that are all tailored around the particular location to describe where and when they might happen. They have a little bit more description than just skeleton or zombie or bandit. Instead, they're reanimated skeletons of the tomb guardians of the place or great oozes that seep up through the floor or a confused specter who flees if attacked.
So there are different little bits of encounter to it. Locations. This one's a short one because it's only, I think, seven sections. But you'll notice that the locations don't describe very much. They're very, very...
fast loose descriptions that are intended to give you just enough that you can fill it out with some of the secrets and clues or some of the encounters you get to build this out with the pacing that you have treasure there's like treasure parcel kind of ideas this is how much monetary treasures you're expected to give out here's a couple consumables that you can give out and you're intended that you could give out multiple consumables and then one permanent item from the list right you have one list one you can pick one of the items from this list and they have some custom magic items
mark we have some custom magic items like the plus one glowing elemental longbow called winds of chaos as a bonus action the creature attuned to bow can add 2d6 damage of fire cold lightning or force damage this ability resets at the next dawn that's a fun one and then uh and then it says like okay and where do you go to next so this is an example of the scroll of a crave another one is the dungeon of the hooded inquisitor and again this is sort of the second in line the first one they learn about
the whole plot line of the adventure. And then they learn that there's things they have to go find. One of the things they have to find is information, which was kept from a knight. The knight was tortured and killed at this dungeon, an actual dungeon dungeon. And maybe there are remnants of his confessions that you can go get to to learn the next part of the story.
And this one is a four-pager, describes the whole background of the Dungeon of the Hooded Inquisitor, gives you a summary of what goes on. Again, key NPCs, secrets and clues, how the adventure might start, the encounters that you might find, DCs for traps and different types of traps that they might run into, and locations. And then this one says, like, here's the Knight's Confession.
Like, here's the MacGuffin-y part is the Knight's Confession. Very lightweight, you know, treasures, consumables, permanent magic items, further adventures, and so on. So the first one is out available right now to patrons. The second one will be out this next week. And we have a new, this is available to hero tier subscribers of Patreon.
So the Sly Flourish Patreon has two tiers, the veteran tier and the hero tier. The hero tier so far, the only difference between the two tiers is that the hero tier had the readings and reflections weekly podcast that I do. I do every Thursday. I do a reading from one of the most recent Sly Flourish article. And then I discuss the background behind it. I'm now going to make these adventure paths.
These adventure scenarios are also going to be available to hero tier subscribers. So if you are looking to get access to these, you can get them by being a hero tier subscriber. I'm probably going to put one of these out every couple of weeks. And then once they're all out, I'm going to get feedback from them. I'm going to see how people like them.
I'm going to hopefully hear from people who have run them and say, does this style work? Is this enough? Do we have the right thing laid out? And if we do, then I will continue the series. I have 10, 11 more. 11 more of these that I can do to fill out the entire Key of Worlds arc. And my hope is that if people like this enough, I will continue forward and do the next set. I guess it's 10.
The next set of 10. So about 15 of these. And it'll probably take a year before all of those come out. But you can find them all as a Hero Tier subscriber to Sly Flourish. Did you know the Dread Thing in Omicron, an excellent product by Raging Swan, which would happen to be on sale last week digitally for eight bucks. Unfortunately, that sale is now over.
But I learned something about it, which I didn't know. Somebody brought this up, which is the Dread Thing in Omicron actually includes markdown files in it. that if you go to DriveThruRPG and you pick up the Dread thing in Omicron, not only do you get the zip file, but you also get a directory full of text files, and those text files are actually Markdown files.
And then my next thought was, you know, I bet if you just renamed those text files to Markdown files, you could put them in Obsidian. So you need to have a crafty way to be able to rename a whole bunch of files from .txt to .md. On the Mac, this is pretty easy. You select all of the files, you right-click and hit rename, and you can do a pattern match for a rename to say, rename all .txt to .md.
And that will turn them all into markdown files. Then you can literally drag that folder into your Obsidian directory, your Obsidian vault, and you get them inside your Obsidian vault. This is my obsidian vault right here, and as you can see, I have both a Dread Thingonomicon and Dread Larinomicon. Now it turns out the Larinomicon, likewise, has text files in it.
And they're all formatted in Markdown. So you have like, here's the Seedy Tavern, or Looting the Dead, the Wizard's Tower, the Smuggler's Den. all available in Markdown, all nicely formatted with headers and lists that you can roll on and all kinds of other stuff.
So if you were looking to kind of fill out your Obsidian vault, if you're an Obsidian user, I am now an Obsidian user and I like Obsidian a lot. It is really cool to be able to just drop this directly, rename the files from .txt to .md. I talked to Crichton over at RagingSwan and said, you know, if you rename those to .md, it could be dropped right into Obsidian. I don't know that he uses Obsidian.
Really, really great stuff, right? And in a really fun way. I wish we had more stuff like this. I wish more products had text versions that we could drop into our own digital notes so that we have all of the list of Occultus Lair stuff. It makes it really streamlined and easy for us to use these kinds of resources while we're in the middle of working on our game prep notes for Obsidian.
so really you know great stuff and there's a hundred different ones 73 different ones for the dread thing inomicon and dread layer inomicon likewise has i think a hundred different layers so all different kinds of you know liches like you go to a lich and say like outside the layer and what's going on major features fantastic stuff so just another really cockatrice den and stuff you'll find a cockatrice den i wrote a cockatrice den for fantastic layers
You know, really, not every monster is here, but many, many monsters. All the different dragons have one. A hydra den. So really cool way to get all of your material that you normally get locked up in a PDF in a digital format. One of the things that I kind of wish for tabletop role-playing games in the digital space is more flexible digital versions of our products.
One of the things that I do, I think every book except the workbook has a, or no, I guess the companion, I don't think the companion does either, but the companion actually does have kind of something else. has an EPUB version. You can get all of my books in EPUB.
And one of the reasons I do that is I want you to be able to get your book and view it on your phone easily without having to go to PDF. And EPUB is a fantastic, flexible format. It's accessible, so it can be more easily read by screen readers. It's really, really cool to have a flexible digital version.
A pile of Markdown files is also a very flexible version because there are many places where you can store those Markdown files to be able to view it on multiple platforms. The minute I put it in my Obsidian vault, it meant I had it both on my phone and on my desktop and any other platform I have now has all of the information from the Dread Thingonomicon available to me.
And what I said was, boy, I should do that with my stuff. So then I realized that I already have, that we do have this stuff available in a format that you can drop into it. So if you go to the Sly Flourish homepage, inside the homepage you can find Lazy GM's resource documents. This will all be linked down in the show notes below.
And the Lazy GM resource document is material that is taken from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Lazy DM's Companion, and the Lazy DM's Workbook. Not all of it, but a lot of it that is on there. This is available to everybody that can access Sly Flourish. Everybody gets access to this.
And it is available under a Creative Commons attribution license, which means you can share it with people. It means you can use it in commercial products. All you have to do is properly cite it as you can see from the citation. So you still need to follow the instructions. But the instructions are very, very simple. And it means that this stuff is usable in lots of different ways.
So we have two different documents. One is the Lazy GM's resource document, which is Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, the Companion in the Workbook. But then we also have the Lazy GM's 5e Monster Builder resource document, which is a document that myself and Scott Gray and Teo Sabadea put out as part of Forge of Foes.
It includes material from Forge of Foes and how to build a quick monster and some other descriptions about things that we wanted to put out there so that people can do this. So this is all available in HTML off of Sly Flourish.
But an awesome community member, fellow patron of Sly Flourish named Dpro, also known as CritTech, wrote some code that takes this stuff and automatically converts it to multiple formats, including Markdown for Obsidian. But it includes many formats, EPUB, full EPUB version. So you can stick it on your phone in an e-book reader and read it there. HTML, JSON, Markdown, PDF.
It's available in all of these different formats. And that includes both the Lazy GM resource document and the 5e Monster Builder stuff. Both are available. And one of them is under, if you go to, you have Markdown Obsidian, which has all the files in Markdown formatted for Obsidian and the Obsidian for the 5e Monster Builder as well. And you can download this from GitHub.
there's like a little download section. I think if you go to code and you say download zip, you can download the zip file of all of that stuff and then drop those directories dressed into your obsidian vault. And what you get is the lazy GM monster documents here. And it has stat blocks and, that you can drop in Markdown.
These are actually stat block formatted into Markdown, so you can drop those into a page. But also descriptions like, you know, descriptions of lightning rods, lazy tricks. You know, the lazy tricks is a really handy one to have. Monster rolls, you know, what are the different rolls that we've got?
different bosses and minions, and of course the quick start monster, building a quick monster stuff, including the table. The table doesn't quite format because my page is pretty narrow. But the whole table that's available all in Obsidian.
So you can drop all of that stuff in Obsidian, which means like right away we have the Dread Thing-a-Nomicon, the Dread Laricon-a-Nomicon, the Lazy GM monster documents, and the Lazy GM resource doc with all of this stuff. Example strong starts, safety tools,
you know all the stuff that you might want to use and format in different ones in obsidian we have it all all here and it is really really fun to use so i'm very proud of the fact that we are giving so much material away in the lazy gm resource document and the lazy gm monster monster resource document as well and again one of the reasons that we feel that i feel comfortable giving away so much material for other people is because of the patrons of sly flair so patrons again your support to the work that i do
gives me the freedom to be able to put stuff out there for everybody else. And I'm not the only creator who's like that. Dyson does the same thing. I've talked about Dyson logos all the time and the wonderful Dyson maps. And he's got like 1,200 maps available on his website and like five or 600 that are available under an open license that you can use.
And the reason he's able to do that is the Patreon that he's got. So please consider supporting Dyson's patron. as well as others. This is an area where patronage really works. It works well, and it means that the whole community is better because of all the work that we could put out there.
My wife and I, the two arms of the Sly Flourish Empire, have gotten together to create the Sly Flourish 2025 calendar. We did this last year as well, but we did it late enough in the year that it was kind of hard for people to get it. They couldn't do it for Christmas and Thanksgiving and stuff like that. So we want to do it early. So we have done it in early October, mid-October, I should say.
We now have the 2025 Sly Flourish calendar ready to go. It is available both in U.S. and Canada for one style of calendar. And internationally, in a different style, the international calendar is sort of a big flip-over type calendar. The U.S. version is the more traditional horizontal calendar that you flip up and down.
And we have artists from several different artists who have done art for various books of ours, very Sly Flourish-related books, who all gave their permission for us to include their art in our calendar, along with, and each month has a nice little lazy DM tip at the top of the calendar. So you can enjoy and kind of pontificate it.
Each month you can flip the page and think about the artwork and let it inspire you and then read the tip and sit and meditate upon it and incorporate it into your prep. So very, very
cool product this is the kind of products that we wanted to add to this store we also have like cups and t-shirts i'm wearing a lazy return to the lazy dungeon master t-shirt right now that i got from the store fantastic stuff so you can find all of that on this life flourish bookstore uh but we wanted to talk particularly about the calendar we'll mention it again in early november when people are starting to get together it makes a fantastic gift uh fun thing for your gm some beautiful beautiful beautiful artwork that you can enjoy all year round
So an interesting thing. So last week, we are starting to get more preview stuff of the 2024 Dungeon Masters Guide, the 2024 Dungeons & Dragons D&D Dungeon Masters Guide. And they talked about items and item crafting as being one of the features in the 2024 D&D DMG. And what's interesting is Level Up Advanced 5e and Tales of the Valiant and their Game Master's Guide.
For Level Up Advanced 5e, it's known as Trials and Treasure. And for Tales of the Valiant, known as the Game Master's Guide, which actually just came out recently, both of them include crafting rules as well. So there's two... new elements that it seems like all of the new, at least those three versions of 5e that are all coming out.
I mean, Tales of the Valiant, I'm sorry, Level Up Advanced 5e has now been out a couple of years, but still they're kind of the newer iterations of 5e. If we're going to put them into the new generation of 5e, All three of those editions did two interesting things when it came to magic items. One is all of them now include prices on their magic items.
Apparently this was a common enough outcry that the designers of all three versions of 5e said, we're going to add prices. It'll be interesting to see how this prices fluctuate and vary. Somebody's going to have to do a big spreadsheet analysis and look at all the prices side by side and decide how they do it. But all of them include prices, which is interesting.
And the second thing is all of them include some way to craft magic items. Tales of the Valiant does in the Game Master's Guide, Level Up Advanced 5e does in Trials and Treasure, and it sounds like, and almost certainly the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide also includes rules for crafting.
But crafting is a really interesting thing, and there are certain parts of RPG design that I kind of talk about as being intractable problems. And what I mean by that is there are some times where there's something that people really want... But nobody can exactly agree on how to implement it. And there ends up not being an ideal way because we all have our way that we think works best.
And you can tell an intractable problem. You can tell when there's an intractable problem in tabletop role-playing games. When you feel like you have the answer and no one else seems to understand it. That means it's kind of an intractable problem. An example that I often bring up is adventure design. We've been designing adventures for D&D for 50 years.
There's literally 50 years worth of adventures. And I think that over those 50 years, you start to see trends that aim in one particular direction or another. But if you look today, you will find many different kinds of adventures. Everything from super streamlined, super slim adventures, like the Arcane Libraries adventures for 5e, and then super rich, super thick adventures
heavy scene-based adventures that you'll find from other publishers some of them are very small like if you look at robert schwab's adventure he calls them quests for shadow the weird wizard four or five page adventures and then you look at adventures that wizards of the coast publishes like curse of strahd or tomb of annihilation and they're 100 192 pages they're huge we have crown of the oath breaker which is like a thousand pages and then we have the one page adventure uh contest which has
100 adventures of one page it's all over the map right you would think we would have come together and said ah this is the ideal adventure format that works best and it turns out there isn't an ideal adventure format i also argue i'm not sure that there's an ideal crafting an ideal way to do item crafting it's not like people didn't know how to do item crafting
It's that it's a really kind of tricky problem to handle item crafting. And before I'm not probably going to dive into the specific instances of how these books do item crafting. Instead, I want to talk about some of the tricks that occur.
And looking at the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide and looking at the Level Up Advanced 5e Trials and Treasure Guide, and I don't expect it's going to be solved in the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. They don't tend to kind of talk about some of these problems that occur
with with with item crafting and there's a there's kind of a bunch of issues one of the interesting parts and i really wish i could find this quote i couldn't find it but i recall the designers of the original borderlands video game borderlands is a first person shooter video game that is also sort of like a diablo style loot game where you pick up random guns with random weird effects and
And then as you're progressing through the game, you would slowly find newer gear with newer random effects that were better scaled for whatever level you were that would replace your old stuff. So you're constantly switching weapons in and out of your character when you had it. And there were different rarities.
There were different power levels and there were different effects that these guns would have. And somebody said, how come you don't have a way to craft guns in Borderlands? And the developer of Borderlands said, if we put a crafting system in, no one would play the game.
That if you put a crafting system into Borderlands, people will craft their favorite item, and then they'll never want any of the other loot that drops because they spent all the work crafting that one item. And then the game is basically over because the game, like half of the gameplay loop of that game is getting new guns and trying out new guns.
And if you're not getting new guns and trying out new guns, you're not just shooting people. And that's boring after a certain amount of time. And that getting those new guns that do those new, new effects were a thing. I, This quote is actually pretty old, and I don't know that they've actually stuck to that.
I was doing a little bit of reading that Borderlands did add some item crafting things, or at least ways to re-roll perks. I noticed this in Diablo 4 as well, that Diablo 4 is still another game where you get tons and tons of loot that drops. But you can tailor some of that loot. You can add some properties under the loot. Even the properties have random elements.
So that means you might want to re-roll certain properties by going through a dungeon again and again. So when you come up with a system... where you can aim towards an optimal thing. You don't actually want the players to reach that optimal level because then the rest of it becomes boring. And I think the same thing is true when we look at tabletop role-playing games.
It's a little different because we as GMs know the players and know the kind of stuff that they want. And we know that we can keep that loop going differently because we can really customize our reward system for a particular character based on what we know more so than like a computer game can do it.
But we still have the problem that if we offer a crafting system to players to be able to build their magic items, that essentially has the risk of invalidating all of the other loot that shows up. An example was if you talk to a player and they say, hey, I really want to make a great cool sword. I want to make a cool plus two sword and I'd like it to cast fireball or whatever.
I want it to be a flame tongue. I'm going to do that. They want to make a flame tongue long sword. I really want a flame tongue long sword. then you say, okay, here's the process by which, A, you have to reach like level seven before you can do it or whatever. There's usually a level limit on when you can even attempt to outdo that.
That way you have some limit on saying you're not going to get an overpowered item too early. So I think most of the systems have a level limit on when you can start to make an item of a particular quality. But once you get that, then there's this process to make the item. But let's say they go through that process and now they've made their flametongue longsword.
A, they've gone through a lot of effort to create that longsword. Guess what they're never going to want to do? Replace that longsword. So if you say, ah, I have a new plus three longsword that does this other thing, one of two things is going to happen.
One, they're going to throw away the plus three because they already have their flametongue longsword and they like it better because it does an extra 2d6 damage, which is an extra seven points, which is better than the three plus that you get on that. Or they feel bad. They switch to the other weapon.
But they feel bad because they went through all the trouble to make the other flametongue longsword. It has this big meaning to them, but now it's just in a bag and they never use it anymore. And they'll feel that loss. Now you've hit that sense of loss aversion. So there's that tricky bit of like, when do you do it? And what happens when they get that item?
So a lot of times what people will do is they'll say like, ah, well, I'll just make it harder for you to get that item. So one way that you do it is you say like, sure, here's how you can craft the item, but you need to have the heart of an efreet lord, right? And the heart of the efreet lord is required in order for you to forge your flametongue longsword. Well, guess what?
By the time they get to the point where they killed the Ifrit Lord to get the heart of the Ifrit Lord, they could have just been rewarded a flametongue longsword instead of going through this whole painful quest in order to forge one. You've essentially made the heart of the Ifrit Lord as difficult to acquire as the longsword itself. So then what was the point of even having crafting?
Why not just make it loot that they acquire? Why go through that whole process?
so if you make it you you kind of need to make it as difficult to make an item as it is to find an item or one of those two is invalidated and another example is like making healing potions the player the dnd 2024 players handbook actually has a way for you to craft healing potions and it takes time and money it doesn't take as much money as it does to buy it but they offset by that by the amount of time that it takes
But if you make it too easy to make healing potions, they'll just have a thousand healing potions. And now you don't need a cleric anymore because everybody's drinking healing. Everyone's got like 20 of them. And anytime they take any damage, they're just downing healing potions, right? So then you have to have another limit of like, oh, you can't carry any more than three, right?
Or you can't make any more than three. There's not enough ingredients. You have to put all these limitations on them. And all the limitations that you're putting in place are the same kind of limitations you would put in place if you were...
making those items available as part of loot you would just say you only find three healing potions can i buy any no the local apothecary only has two on hand and it takes her two months to make more so you're only ever going to get two from her right you have to have these limitations in place because if you don't again quoting sid meyer i think it's sid meyer that you know players will optimize their way out of the fun that they will get to the point where like wow damage doesn't matter anymore because i'll just down healing potions as a free as a bonus action every time that i every time that i do it
So that's really tricky. Another part about crafting that's really a difficult thing is lots of time it takes many, many weeks to make an item.
So let's say if you follow the rules that these books have written, and again, I haven't seen the D&D 2024 rules yet, but I've seen Tales of the Valiant and I've seen Level Up Advanced 5V's rules, and a lot of times they have an amount of time that it takes to make those items. And that question is, there's only two ways to handle that kind of time.
And one is make it painful, or two is you abstract it. But what the hell else is, what's everyone else doing while you're spending 24 weeks trying to forge your flametongue longsword? Like, how do you manage that down? Oh, well, guess what, everybody? You know, Jack's character is going to be forging a flametongue longsword, but it's going to take 24 weeks. What are your options for that?
Are your options, well, I guess Jack's character is going to retire. And I remember I was talking to some friends of mine about this, and they said, yeah, in the old days, they just retired that character. Like, they were going to make a thing. And they just made a new character up, and that character went away, while they had another character that went in there.
And you're like, that seems weird. Like, we're going to retire a character so they can spend 24 weeks to make a Flametongue Longsword. And then meanwhile, everyone else is getting tons of loot, because think about how many dungeons you can go after in 24 weeks, and all the loot that you're going to get from all of those dungeons. So...
it's another one where but you got to have something there because if you say like oh we're just going to time skip the 24 weeks or guess what you have 24 mages working on it for one week and by the time you come back for your next adventure they'll have a flame tongue longsword for you which isn't a terrible option right you just commission it from someone else you go to the mages of cartan and say hey i'd like to forge a flame tongue longsword and they say great bring me the heart of an afridi lord and also 24 000 gold and give us a week
And we'll buy the components and our mages will work on it, and it'll cost you 24,000 or however much your flametongue longsword is going to cost. And then we'll have it for you by the time of the next session. That's not a terrible way to go.
And again, you can look at it and say, well, the Heart of the Afreet Lord, I could have just awarded a flametongue longsword there, but now I've got this kind of fun crafting thing, and they got to decide what they were going to do. So these are all complications that exist with crafting.
Which have existed as long as crafting has been a thing, which I think has been a thing for almost as long as D&D has been a thing. And yet we still can't find that ideal system of like, what happens when you get your best in slot?
You know, what happens when you've basically just made the crafting system essentially another loot system, only it's more complicated, but the players are going to sniff that out and say, I guess we should just wait till we get our loot. Right. That like, you know, how do you how do you kind of manage this whole thing? It's a really tricky problem.
And another part of that tricky problem, which I think at least I know 2014 D&D had it and they had it in Xanathar's. And I know that Level Up Advanced 5e and Tales of the Valiant have this as well, is what about downtime for having for buying magic items? Can you do that?
And I thought Xanathar's had a really fun way of handling buying magic items, which was dealing with shady brokers that you had to woo and party with and meet. And it cost you time and energy and money to even find the person to buy items. And then what I often did was they didn't have a selection of everything.
But they instead would roll, I would roll like three random items and say, these are the items they have available. Do you want to buy them or not? And I think that process actually works pretty well. That's sort of like a random loot system.
That's a little different, which is you might find the shady magic item vendor and the shady magic item vendor doesn't have everything, but you could roll three times on the uncommon table and say they have these three items. And then you have, you have ideas there. So all of these are like really tricky bits for how to manage loot.
that kind of gets away from what the core gameplay loop is of D&D, which is you go on adventures, you defeat monsters, and you find treasure. And that treasure has stuff in it. And maybe that treasure has items that happen to be perfect for the character. Maybe it's just random stuff. And maybe you as the GM can decide, ah, this piece of loot exists there or not.
And, you know, the whole idea of crafting is something that I think is trickier than the books describe. And I think it's worth thinking about. So when you're thinking about the main message I'd like you to get away with is when you're thinking about crafting systems, think about these other problems that can occur. Think about scarcity. Think about time.
Think about what happens when they have their best in slot and what that means. These are all kind of issues that exist in crafting that the books tend not to talk about, but still will affect your game when you're running a crafting system. When the D&D 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide comes out, we'll take a look at the crafting rules in that.
Maybe we'll even compare the crafting systems of the different ones and think about them from this perspective of how do you deal with scarcity? How do you deal comparing this to random loot? How do you deal with the concern of a best-in-slot item that means they're never going to want another item? How do you deal with all of these different factors? How do you deal with the factor of time?
And what do you do with the player while that time is going on? These are all things that we've got to talk about. I love random encounters. I love random tables and using random tables for things. And over the years, I've come up with and I've discovered from the community and I've picked up a whole bunch of different, what I'm going to refer to as advanced random encounter tricks.
These are ways of using random tables and random encounters in order to make random encounters more that are far richer and deeper and have layers of texture to them and lots of interesting ways that they interact with your characters and with your players and offering player agency.
And I wanted to do a video where we just focused on those advanced tricks and put them all together into one place where you can find them all. This is going to parallel with a Sly Flourish article that I'm putting together on this very topic as well. So you can find a list of these available on Sly Flourish as well.
So here is my list of useful tricks for getting the most value out of random tables. First, roll twice. When you have a random table or like a random encounter table that has like a bunch of different monsters on it, you can roll twice and then combine the two encounters together. You get to decide how these encounters combine together. Are these two groups that are working together?
Are they two groups that are smashing against one another? Did one group defeat the other? You get to decide what it means to see these two random encounters together. But what I have found is the minute you... Often when you roll a single random encounter, it's kind of boring. But the minute you roll and add in another one, it becomes really interesting. And it's very simple to do.
It's a great way to shake up your brain. It's a great way to come up with a completely unique encounter. It also makes your encounter table, as somebody argued about this, I'm pretty sure, exponentially more valuable. Instead of like a 1 to 20 encounter table, now you've got a 1 in 400. Roughly 1 in 400. You can't get, you know, if you roll same Cs, it doesn't quite work right.
But generally speaking, rolling twice and mixing the two results is really, really cool. Mix multiple tables together. So first of all, you have to find sources for multiple types of tables. And what are the kinds of tables that I find most useful?
The ones I find most useful are the ones that I published in my own book, because if I didn't think they were the most useful ones, I wouldn't have published them in my own book. And that's in the Lazy DM's companion. I also have them in the Lazy DM's workbook, and they're available for free at the Lazy GM resource document, which you can find.
And these type of extra tables that I often include often have like species, monuments, locations, effects, items, conditions, and descriptions. Ways to kind of further describe what's going on. And you can layer these with your encounters. So monuments is a good one. Instead of just running into a bunch of goblins, you're running into a bunch of goblins that are around an old obelisk.
And then if you roll a condition and it's like a smoky, well, now you've run into a bunch of goblins that are lurking around a smoking obelisk. And then you roll like an effect and maybe the effect is acid. Well, maybe these are weird acid goblins or the goblins that coat their weapons in acid that are hanging around in the smoky mists around an old obelisk. Now you've got texture, right?
Now you've added detail. You've added things that can matter both for combat. You've added things that can just make the thing more interesting. Those work really, really well. So when you have those lists of sort of supplementary tables that sit alongside your random encounter... The ones that I really recommend, I call them the core adventure generators.
They are available both in the lazy GM resource document. They're also available if you subscribe to Sly Flourish in the free adventure generator that's available to newsletter subscribers. Absolutely free to sign up. You can find a link in the show notes. And also available here. And it's a bunch of different tables that are generally useful for lots of different things.
But I have six tables in particular. Locations, monuments, and items. So you have things like cairn, tower, mansion for location. You have obelisk, orb, effigy for monument. Items are like bell or a bone or a circlet. And then condition, description, and origin.
Smoky, acidic, bloodied, frozen, poison, or ruined, decrepit, obsidian, ancient, festering, golden, or human, elven, dwarven, elemental, giant, fiendish, and so on. And when you throw these layers onto it, your whole scenario kind of changes. This whole random encounter kind of changes by mixing in these different things. So that is a big tip that I have as well.
Along with these multiple tables, I recommend creating and using a faction table. So a faction table is custom to you and your campaign.
Even if you're running a published campaign, even if you're running something that someone else has put together, you can still know who are the major factions, who are the major gods, who are the major players that exist in your slice, your creation, your instance of this campaign. and build a list from that. And ideally, you want to have about 20 of these factions. They could be criminal groups.
They could be major political players. They could be historic people from history. They could be gods. Gods are a really easy one. And fill out a list of 20. Put a bunch of those things in there. And then along with your multiple tables, roll on that list. And now when you mix that with a random encounter, now there's another layer that connects those goblins to
a god or it connects these you know these bandits are connected to a criminal group or whatever you can sort of tailor make your encounter based on the factions that exist for your campaign specifically that's not a list that i can give you although i've created faction lists like this for things like eberron and city of arches and midgard but it really works best when you create your own faction list ideally around 20 of these and you can keep it for your whole campaign you can change things in and out and you can roll on that faction list when you're mixing your tables
Roll to see what came before. So a lot of systems have you roll to determine whether or not you're gonna run into a random encounter. And sometimes you roll and nothing happens. And that means nothing happens at all. Like that means that you just go right to the next point. That doesn't have to be the case. Instead, you can roll a random encounter that occurred here previously.
And again, you can mix this with the other tips that we have. So you can actually pick a monument where all this stuff happened. You can add your conditions and descriptions and effects and stuff like that. And you can roll twice and say, ah, an ogre ran into a bunch of bandits. The bandits are all dead. Parts of the bandits are missing because the ogre took it back to its lair to eat them.
And there's stuff strewn about. And you can lay that situation out there without describing that an ogre did it. And now the players have an investigation they can do. Oh, what the hell happened here? There's a bunch of dead, crushed bandits. And parts of their bodies are missing. And there's these huge tracks. And the tracks are going off to the east. But we're heading north-south.
I wonder what happened here. They're not in any danger because the ogre's already gone. The bandits are already dead. All this stuff already takes place. And now the players have agency to decide, do we want to go after that ogre? We know where it is. We know where it went. Or are we just going to keep going? We don't have to deal with it at all. Bandits are a bunch of dicks anyway.
We don't need to worry about avenging the bandits, right? But maybe like, oh, but these bandits were tied to this particular faction. I'll bet you if we can avenge these bandits, maybe we can get in good with that faction. Now, because of those other layers, you've created other interesting things that can occur, right?
So mixing up those tables can, again, build these really rich tapestries of things. Monuments, I mentioned before, monuments being a really important element.
That monuments, rolling on a monument table to add in where an encounter took place gives it some... Think about Lord of the Rings, the first Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring movie, when they're fighting off the Uruk-hai at the end. There's this weird ancient pavilion there. sitting there with a bunch of eagles on it. I'm sure there's some history there.
I'm sure it's in the Similarian, and I just didn't read it. But there's this place there. There's this ancient stuff there. There's meaning. He's fighting them off of these stairs on this place, right? They can't get to him. He's managed to use the terrain around him to create a choke point when he's facing these guys. That's really fun, right? It's interesting.
There's a monument there and it means something and they could learn secrets and clues by examining it. So add monuments to your locations. And now what you've created is a scene. You have an interesting location. You've got an interesting thing that catches the eye that creates a vivid setting for your encounter. And then you get to mix in all these other things and do those encounters as well.
So now we have a few that I'm going to call old school techniques. These are ones that have been around since the oldest days and largely because they came from the wargaming side of things. But all of these can work really well even if you're playing newer RPGs, newer heroic RPGs. These three roles still matter. The first one being attitude.
What is the attitude of the creatures that you might be facing? If you're running into a random encounter, maybe are they friendly? Are they hostile? You get to decide. If you don't have a table for this, this is one of these things I call table-less rolls, where you don't need a table to roll against, and instead, you can just roll a die, and the higher the die, the more aggressive they are.
If you roll a D6 and they roll a one, they're pretty neutral or they're friendly. And you can decide like, are they truly friendly or are they just neutral at that point? Or you roll a six and they're super hostile. You can shift that back and forth depending on the kind of encounter or the kind of situation and say, well, they might be friendly to, you know, suspicious.
Or they might be neutral to totally hostile, right? You can decide what you want that range to be. But an easy way is you just roll a die, and the lower the die, the more friendly they are, and the higher the die, the more hostile they are. But you can add that on top of all of these other ones that you have. Distance, how far away do you notice them?
Some of this might be based on the characters and how well they do on a particular roll if they're scouting ahead and something like that. But you can also just roll a die, and the higher the die, the further away they are. On a one, you don't notice until you're almost on top of them. On a six, they're pretty far away, and you can see them far away.
And that changes the agency of the players being able to engage with it or not. They get to decide what do they want to do if they see something for far away. Again, add this into all your other tables. Oh, we noticed that there's a bunch of goblins fighting some bandits. Do we just want to watch it play out? Do we want to see who wins? Do we want to help one side over the other?
Can we learn anything about either group to decide whether we should do that? Now you've got options. You've got things that they can do. Activity, what kind of activities are they engaged in when you run into them? So there's a couple ways to handle this. Sometimes you can find activity tables for this.
The Level Up Advanced 5e Monstrous Menagerie has an awesome set of activities per monster in the book. So you can look up the monsters, you can find what activities they're up to, you can roll a die and decide, are they scavenging for food? Are they sleeping? Are they engaged in other kinds of revelry? You get to decide what they're gonna do.
Another table-less way to do this is, again, you can roll a d6, and on the lower part of the roll, the more benign the activity. On the higher roll, the more frantic or sinister the activity. So bandits, you could roll, and on a one, they are hanging out, playing cards, or sleeping. They just camped out for the night. They're not really doing anything.
On a six, they are raiding a, you know, there's a carriage and they're raiding the carriage and they're murdering people, right? You get to decide the intensity of the activity based on that die roll. I really like this idea of tableless rolls because you don't have to look anything up. You can just roll a die and in your head you can decide.
And the way that I do it is usually the lower the roll, the less extreme, the higher the roll, the more extreme. You can do that for weather as well. One I don't have on here is weather, right? If you want to add weather, you can throw some weather on there and now you have another layer that really creates a scene. So there's lots of stuff you can do there.
The last thing I'll leave you with is this idea called the Oracle Die. And the Oracle Die is often used for solo role-playing games, role-playing games where you play on yourself. And the idea of an Oracle Die is you ask a question and then you roll a die to see what way it's going to go.
It's a way of adding a true stochastic element to your role-playing game, where the game can go in a different direction that you didn't expect by rolling on the die. And a lot of time it's based on outcomes, but other times you might roll a die to add all different kinds of layers.
Iron Sworn is a fantastic role-playing game that has tons and tons of tables for your Oracle die that you can go look through. You can take some of those ideas and build your own lists from them. They are also available under a Creative Commons license. so you can use them in different ways. But a lot of the ways that an oracle die works is just to kind of make decisions.
And you can say, on a one to three, this happens. On a four to six, this happens. And then you can change the odds a little bit. On a one or two, this will happen. On a four to six, this will happen. That way, the odds are in a different way, but you're still rolling a die to determine what that outcome can be. So that idea of using an oracle die, I think, can really work.
So this was my, you know, when I sat down to think about all of the advanced tricks for particularly for random encounters. There's lots of other ways to use random tables for other things, too. But specifically, we're talking about generating an encounter. What are all of the elements that you can use and that you can roll on? Would you use all of these? Maybe not.
That's a lot of layers to have. But you might want to add a few layers here and there from time to time when you think something needs to be spiced up a little bit. You can do things. Add weird conditions. Roll twice and have two encounters that mash up together.
Roll all these different things, and then that way you're creating truly unique, interesting, context-relevant encounters that can really make the game head in new directions that you would never think of before. So those are my thoughts for advanced random encounter tricks. Every month on the Sly Flourish Patreon, we have the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A.
Patrons of Sly Flourish can ask any question related to tabletop role-playing games. Every Friday, I sit down and answer all of these questions. Some of those questions come back here to the show so we can dive in a little deeper. Olivia says, I love the campaign arcs in City of Arches. I wonder how this question managed to make its way to the top of the list. I can't understand it.
Who could really say? I love the campaign arcs in City of Arches. The level by level questing scratches an itch in my planning brain. My question is, there's also so many amazing story hooks in the City of Arches preview that I'd also love to incorporate into my sessions.
How do you balance the campaign arc outline with side hooks and story quests without bogging down the pacing or getting off track on leveling? Really good question. So one of the ways that I do it, and there's a particular quest model that I really like, and you can find this in the City of Arches.
I originally saw it in Dragon of Icespire Peak, which I think has a really good quest model that I like a lot. And I call it the two of three quest model. And the idea is that the characters are given three options for three quests that they're going to take. They pick one of those and complete it. And when they come back, the remaining two options are still there. They pick one of those options.
And at that point, the third option goes away and three new options show up. So that means every time they go back to wherever it is that they are getting quests, and this might not even be the same place. It could be that these are quests they picked up in different spots. that they generally are two to three choices at any junction where they're ready to pick a new quest.
And you're getting rid of quests that they're clearly not interested in. So they don't have to hang on to this giant log of quests. Those old quests are going away. So that's one way that you can kind of handle it. And you can handle the sort of side hooks and story quests that aren't part of the campaign arc in a few ways.
One way that I'm probably going to do, I actually got this idea from your question when I answered it over on Patreon,
was that you can sort of turn off the quests for the main arc for some time i'm actually i'm playing cyberpunk 2077 right now that the rpg cyberpunk role-playing game cyberpunk 2077 and they do this where you'll reach a certain point in the story and it'll say okay it's going to take me time to go figure out the next part go do other stuff and
And then you have new quests that show up that they can do for side quests and other things. And then their main quest NPC after a time comes back and says, hey, I figured it out. I now know where the Blackfire Brazier is. We've followed the map. We've done it. And now I know the path that you can take to hit the next Blackfire Brazier. And that way, they can get some other stuff done.
I'm going to do this on my own. My characters are getting ready to light the first of the three Blackfire Braziers. Once they do and they go back, they're going to say, well, what do we do next? And I'm going to have the quest NPC saying, well, we know that there are two of them.
We're going to do some investigations of this, and I'm going to talk to the mages of Kartan and dig into the libraries, and we'll learn more information about where the other two actually are. In the meantime, here are three people that could use your help or whatever. And then they can kind of do other things, do other quests for a little bit. But then your other question is about leveling.
What do you do about leveling? Well, one way is slow it down. And you could say like, instead of, so the City of Arches quest arcs, the Campaign arcs and City of Arches all generally assume you get one level after each part of the arc. But you could certainly slow that down. And you could certainly increase that to, it requires two adventures in order to level.
And that way you have room for two adventures and one main adventure and one sub quest. The other one is you could still say there's still value in doing these other adventures, but you make it clear the characters are going to level up when they do these big ones.
And then you just say like, Hey, you're just not going to level, you know, and hopefully the players aren't so fixated on leveling that they're still willing to do quests, even though they're not necessarily getting quote unquote experience for those things. But another way is you could just, you could just slow down leveling.
If you're doing the pacing of leveling yourself, you could decide, Hey, they're going to get a quest. They're going to get a level after each quest and that would work well. And that's probably what I'm going to, that's probably what I'm going to do. So you can, those are hopefully some options for how to handle focused campaign arcs while at the same time offering options for other quests.
PHD20 says, when running combat, I struggle to keep descriptions interesting or flavorful. Every time someone hits an enemy, it's difficult to find the balance of not enough, you hit, versus too much, can't be slicing off limbs every time. Sometimes I ask the players to assist, but I'm looking for general advice to make this part of combat less painful and more interesting.
Probably my number one recommendation is to listen to sword and sorcery audiobooks. One interesting thing about audiobooks is you're hearing narrators describing things, which is different than just reading it on a page.
So while reading books is always great, reading books is a great way to fill your mind with all kinds of good ideas that you can steal from or mash together with other ideas to bring to your game. Listening to books, you learn how to change your voice for different characters, even though you're the same person.
One thing that narrators of audiobooks do is they usually describe a bunch of different characters, and you can tell how they shift their voices around or how they change the cadence or mannerisms and other things to account for that. And listening to audiobooks is a great way to absorb that kind of idea of how to run a bunch of different characters as one human being.
But also, if you listen to sword and sorcery books, some that I would recommend, the Lies of Locke Lamora series is fantastic. It's really, really good. Another one that I loved is the Kings of the Wild slash Bloody Rose is another series that I really liked. Those are really fantastic. If you really want to get into it, the R.A.
Salvador Drizzt books, of all of them, at some point are so detailed in their combat descriptions that it reads like a fencing instruction manual. But... you still get to hear some of the different ideas about what they're doing and how they're doing it and stuff like that. And you can kind of internalize that and use it.
I think you're right on, though, to talk to your players and ask them, like, what does that look like? When they're slashing with a longsword, what does it look like? Oh, I cut from hip to... But riff on it and you don't have to make a great big thing. You can do more than you hit and not make it a great big description.
You know, just adding things like your blade scrapes across their shield or you managed to pierce through one of the joints of their armor and blood begins to trickle out. You know, just practice and practice on your own. You're in your car, you're on your way on your commute. Think through a battle and describe it. Talk about what it's like. Add these little descriptions. Maybe make a list.
Go ahead and make a list of 20. Not that you're going to use it the game, but just to get your mind used to it. I love the idea of just coming up with 20 of these things. What are 25 word descriptions that you can use to do it? Now, you might be thinking, I should go to ChatGPT and ask it to do it. Don't do that. Do it on your own.
Come up with your own because your own ones, you're going to be able to internalize. Your brain's going to wire itself. Neurons are going to connect in your own brain that are going to help you improvise these kinds of descriptions as you go. I don't think it's terribly hard to do. I think it's the kind of thing that takes practice. We're going to make fools out of ourselves.
And that's totally cool because we're there with our friends. Our friends love us. You know, I always go back to don't beat yourself up on this kind of stuff. We're a normal human being sitting at a game, you know, do that. But I think you can do more than you hit. I've definitely seen DMs who, like, they roll, they say 24, and you say hit, and they go 10 damage, and they go to the next person.
You definitely can do more than that. Like, do better than that. Add some element to it. You know, you stab them with your sword. Next.
you know work on it ryan says what would be on your wish list for a more heroic 5e variant that is streamlined and simple like shadow dark things i'm working with by the way i abbreviated this is a long one so i abbreviate it ryan i'm sorry for abbreviating your post things i'm working on but not married to include core six stats as modifiers only i'm on board with that one action per turn i'm on board with that advantage over math bonuses where possible i'm on board with that equipment as an abstraction that sounds awesome static damage on both sides you
Maybe. Only the D20 gets rolled. Spell effects with a more narrative abstract to encourage improvisation outside combat.
I'm going to offer you, and I think I did when I answered this question, but for other people who are thinking about this too, two games that I would take a hard look at because I think that they do a really good job of streamlining heroic fantasy in different ways are 13th Age by Rob Hanesow and Jonathan Tweet.
They have a new version of it coming out called 13th Age version two or something like that. And Shadow of the Demon Lord and Shadow of the Weird Wizard. 13th Age captured heroic fantasy in a streamlined and easy to run system more so than anything else I'd ever seen. It has kind of the best parts of third and fourth edition wired into it in a very story focused heroic game.
And it captures a lot of this stuff. It doesn't have the six stats of modifiers. I think you're absolutely right on there. But it does have the sort of one action per turn. It's not super clunky in how all the combat works. It's probably a little, it's certainly crunchier than I think a truly streamlined Shadow Dark style game would be. But I think you can see a lot of the ideas.
Monster design is super simple in 13th Age. There's a lot of different elements that you can take from 13th Age and run. A third game I'll offer as well after Shadow of the Weird Wizard is Numenera and the Cypher system, which I think has the simplicity of how to handle challenges in that is really, really good.
And I think like if you can figure out a way to add that kind of simplicity of the challenge into the game, that can work really well. Particularly if you're not rolling damage, you look at how they do damage in Numenera because that means you can have a much more streamlined hit point meter than the big ass meter that exists in 5e.
The third game I'll recommend is Shadow of the Demon Lord and Shadow of the Weird Wizard. And the reason why is that game managed to basically split out subclasses into a way that every subclass can be used by any character or any class. So Shadow of the Weird Wizard and Shadow of the Demon Lord has this idea called novice, expert, and master paths.
And when you first start out, you pick a novice path, which is essentially like a fighter, a mage, a thief, or a cleric, kind of. And then when you hit like third level, now you add a expert path. And there's a whole list of expert paths, like 20 some expert paths that feel like subclasses from 5e. Only any of those four paths, those four novice paths can pick any of the subclasses.
So now you've multiplied out the types of combinations of characters that you can have, like four by 20. You've got 80 different combinations just there. But then you get to master paths, which occur, I think, at seventh level. And there's like 100 of those. So now you've multiplied it again.
And what it means is that what Robert Schwab has done as a designer is he's basically said, I can create this small bit of text. that modifies a character slightly by using one of these expert or master paths. But I've made that useful for any of the other types of characters, which means that every one that he adds multiplies out all of them and makes the book one volume.
I actually found out that my physical version of Shadow the Weird Wizard is shipping, which is going to be awesome. And it means in a small volume, he's able to create a really huge amount of possible characters to build.
And I think that that is a really outstanding style that I would, if I were building a heroic fantasy game, that's what I would do is I would, if I was going to add like 5e style subclasses, I would make sure that those subclasses are usable by maybe any of the classes, but certainly by, you could have a martial one that any of the martial classes could choose.
So you may not make it so that like the, you know, the blade singer subclass, if you have the blade singer subclass, you say like, well, can the blade singer be for any spellcaster type? Right. Or can it be for any, you know, and of course, you have to balance this so that you don't create crazy broken combinations. But I think Robert Schwab has managed to do it.
So if you're making a game from scratch, you can look at each subclass option, whatever they happen to be, and decide, how do I make this subclass viable for all the possible classes? That really expands things out tremendously. So that is something that I would definitely look at if I were making a game, which I am not. But if I were, that would be something that I would do.
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