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D&D 5E Discussion

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
What 2E modules were there? Only one I can recall is FROA1/Ninja Wars

For Birthright: King of the giantdowns seems to be the best one. It is not really an adventure module, but more like a setting book with seeds for campaign adventures.

Legends of the Hero Kings turns the domain action and rolls into mini adventures, which I think is really needed to make Birthright Domain feels alive.

When it comes to standard aventuring modules, we are left with
Warlock of the Stonecrowns
the Sword of Roele
The second feels more like your usual dungeon romp, and I have not read the first one.
So basically, they already require quite some work from the DM to make them work, except for these 2.
 

deuxhero

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Jul 30, 2007
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Location
Flowery Land
Ninja Wars would definitely need some GM work, not because of unusual format but because there's some inconsistent quality (the kind that seems to be a rushed development or editor). Most events have instructions on what happens if the PCs did various things up to and including not being present (good and makes it easy to put the PCs on the other sides of the conflict), but one of the last ones assume the PCs fall for a red herring, have enough stealth to follow the guy and not enough stealth to leave without getting caught after they realize their mistake and all followed instead of just one, with no instructions given for how to proceed if the PCs did otherwise. The city uses Speak With Dead on a murdered man, yet the idea of a non-human attacker with the ability to turn invisible is deemed so implausible the guards on duty must be deemed failures and killed as punishment.

Otherwise looks like a fine module.
 
Last edited:

fobia

Guest
SCAG isn't very good. It's options are few. The first mechanical expansion, it was kind of meh.
Most of the main adventures aren't great. Out of the Abyss can be run as a decent survival campaign, but it's too easy in 5e to cheese.
Curse of Strahd is great. Fucking great.
There's a new supplement book in november.
I don't know much about volos.

Just playing Out of the Abyss and imho it's only too easy if the DM really sucks. Like bad.
Or if the players read the book before the sessions ofc. :argh:
 

fobia

Guest
True, but in our case the DM limits the full extent of that ability to rich (in flora and fauna) areas, that aren't infested with eeevil.
I've got the far traveler background and I won't get shit for it, since nobody cares in the underdark.

But I get your point. If you adhere strictly to the handbook's rules, it can be very easy.
 

ShadowSpectre

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Mar 11, 2017
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333
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Limbo
Xanathar's Guide to Everything

Explore a wealth of fantastic new rules options for both players and Dungeon Masters in this supplement for the world’s greatest roleplaying game.

Assembled here for the first time is new information on adventurers of every stripe. In addition, you’ll find valuable advice for those of nefarious intent who must deal with such meddling do-gooders, including the Xanathar’s personal thoughts on how to dispatch anyone foolish enough to interfere with his business dealings. Alongside observations on “heroes” themselves, the beholder fills the pages of this tome with his personal thoughts on tricks, traps, and even treasures and how they can be put to villainous use.

  • Complete rules for more than twenty new subclasses for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, including the cavalier, the inquisitive, the horizon walker, and many more.
  • Dozens of new feats and spells, and a system to give your character a unique, randomized backstory.
  • A variety of systems and tools that provide Dungeon Masters new ways to personalize their home games, while also expanding the ways players can engage in organized play and shared world campaigns.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but evil is in its heart!

Worth checking out for the likely new subclass details, feat-skills, basic spells that will be in the above:

http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-RevisedSubclasses.pdf
http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/June5UA_RevisedClassOptv1.pdf
http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-SkillFeats.pdf
http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-Starter-Spells.pdf
http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/June5UA_RevisedClassOptv1.pdf
I hope there's more spell additions than just adding cantrips and level 1 spells though.
 

deuxhero

Arcane
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Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,328
Location
Flowery Land
a system to give your character a unique, randomized backstory

This is interesting.

I think I'll get this book, sounds like tons of useful stuff.

I'm pretty sure it has been done before and every time it winds up a table that fills a mad-libs backstory like
You were a
5: breadmaker's son
who was
11: drafted
and became a
20: Sorcerer
by
2: finding a place of great arcane power
 

nikolokolus

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2013
Messages
4,090
a system to give your character a unique, randomized backstory

This is interesting.

I think I'll get this book, sounds like tons of useful stuff.

I'm pretty sure it has been done before and every time it winds up a table that fills a mad-libs backstory like
You were a
5: breadmaker's son
who was
11: drafted
and became a
20: Sorcerer
by
2: finding a place of great arcane power

Try to track down a PDF copy of Paul (now Jennell) Jaquays' "Central Casting: Heroes of Legend." Easily the most interesting background generator I've ever seen.
 

Sacibengala

Prophet
Joined
Aug 16, 2014
Messages
1,098
I bought the Volo's Guide to Monsters. Aside from the crappy quality of how the book is manufactered, the content is really interesting. The descriptions of the classic monsters are giving me nice ideas and the art is consistently good, the new monsters are cool, only the new races that I couldn't see much of the appeal. The book could be larger too, 200 and some pages for the same price as the core books that have 1\3 more in content is not that great.
 
Last edited:

Alchemist

Arcane
Joined
Jun 3, 2013
Messages
1,439
Any of you 5E fans checked out D&D Beyond? I haven't played 5E lately and don't really plan to but I was curious what people think of this.

The character sheet technology looks nice... but are people really going to buy all of their 5E content once again for another digital platform? Too bad they don't offer some kind of deal to people who already have the books or the content on Roll20 / Fantasy Grounds. WotC should really just offer a one-time license key that spans all platforms and bundle it with the hardcopy books.
 

Alchemist

Arcane
Joined
Jun 3, 2013
Messages
1,439
Any of you 5E fans checked out D&D Beyond? I haven't played 5E lately and don't really plan to but I was curious what people think of this.

The character sheet technology looks nice... but are people really going to buy all of their 5E content once again for another digital platform? Too bad they don't offer some kind of deal to people who already have the books or the content on Roll20 / Fantasy Grounds. WotC should really just offer a one-time license key that spans all platforms and bundle it with the hardcopy books.

It's just one of the few examples of those bastards doing something correct for once and not being dipshits when it comes to digital. It's MUCH better than fantasy grounds for sure
I think as a digital product it looks of surprisingly good quality (it's made by Curse, who know digital - so they were smart in choosing them). But Fantasy Grounds is a full-fledged virtual tabletop program, with automated game mechanics resolution, etc. How is this even comparable to that functionally? I don't see a virtual tabletop feature in D&D Beyond. It's mostly just very nicely hyperlinked rules information as found in the books, from what I can tell.
 

nikolokolus

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2013
Messages
4,090
Fantasy Grounds is also ruinously expensive, with you needing to buy separate digital books for each player, separate copies of the game for each player etc.
This isn't actually true. I run a game through FG and as the GM I can share all of the ruleset information I need with my players with no additional buy-in from them. Of course if you have multiple people wanting to run games in your group, then there would need to be additional buy-in, but what you describe hasn't been my experience at all.
 

Alchemist

Arcane
Joined
Jun 3, 2013
Messages
1,439
Pricing issues aside, they are different categories of product - so I don't see how comparing them is relevant. Fantasy Grounds = a very complex full-featured VTT. D&D Beyond = a character manager and digital rules compendium.
 

udm

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Aug 14, 2008
Messages
2,752
Make the Codex Great Again!
In librul news...

Dungeons & Dragons Promises To Make Its Adventures More Queer

As we sat together at Gen Con in Indianapolis this weekend talking Dungeons & Dragons, the game’s lead rules developer Jeremy Crawford motioned towards a copy of the Player’s Handbook resting on the table between us. “I wasn’t about to have this book go out and not acknowledge that people like me exist,” he said.

[This story contains spoilers for the D&D adventures Storm King’s Thunder and Curse of Strahd]

In the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Storm King’s Thunder, which Crawford helped publish in 2016, three enormous rocks have crushed the Osstra family’s farm in the abandoned village of Nightstone, spurring them to flee the town. And because this is D&D, the Osstra family and their neighbors were quickly captured by goblins and dragged to a cave. If players choose to rescue Nightstone’s villagers, they’ll meet the 52-year-old wheat farmer Thelbin Osstra, his husband Brynn, and Brynn’s adopted nephew Broland.

“That was a nod specifically to our household,” Crawford said of himself, his husband, and his nephew, who lived with them in 2016 when Storm King’s Thunder was in development. “Although the two men are older than my husband and I are,” he added, laughing.
Seated outside a D&D app demonstration and a busy Starbucks at this annual gathering of D&D heads, tabletop fanatics, and grown adults wearing capes, Crawford told me that publisher Wizards of the Coast is making D&D more gay, and why that’s a great thing. Although the original game was created by two men who were, at one point, conservative Christians, the current team behind D&D is, 40 years later, making an effort to accommodate everyone’s escapist fantasies, not just those of its earliest fans.

What was a scattering of queer characters throughout the years formalized into a guiding principle with 2016’s Curse of Strahd, an adventure that has players take down the vampire Count Strahd. Players can persuade the spellcaster Sir Godfrey Gwilym to join their quest toward Strahd. In the course of said quest, they will encounter Vladimir Horngaard, a commander who was, long ago, his lover. When players find Horngaard, his body is slumped in a throne, ready to fight. If Sir Godfrey accompanies them into battle, a tender and painful moment of recognition may follow.
Every adventure since Curse of Strahd has included one or several queer characters, and Crawford assured Kotaku that this will be a constant into future adventures: “Ever since we brought our adventure design fully back in-house,” he said, “all of our new adventures contain LGBT characters. This is true of our next adventure, Tomb of Annihilation, and it will be true of our stories after that.”

Weaving queer plotlines into D&D games is not hard to do. A passing mention of a same-sex couple might be enough to assert that queer sexuality is a natural part of the D&D universe. And instead of relying on stereotypes or fixating on their sexuality, these characters’ fleshed-out backstories make them people, not icons. Take the Triboar native and retired adventurer Urgala Meltimer, whose wizard wife never returned from the Underdark, whom Crawford says may appear again at a later date so players can solve the mystery of her disappearance.

If you think about D&D’s core values for even a moment, Crawford explained, it’s clear that one of its messages is that the best group is the most diverse group. “You don’t want a party where everyone’s the same,” he said. “It’s a game where you’re always better off working together, working through your differences and achieving victory together, even when you sometimes disagree. So in so many ways a lot of what we’re doing are lessons from D&D itself.”

An impetus for dungeon masters to make games more inclusive exists in D&D’s 5th edition ruleset, which asks players to look beyond sexuality and gender binaries when it comes to character creation: “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior,” it reads.

“It’s important to many of us personally in the company for the game to acknowledge our existence,” Crawford said of publisher Wizards of the Coast, which marched at Seattle’s Gay Pride parade for the first time this year. “It makes a real difference in people’s lives.”

Source: http://kotaku.com/dungeons-dragons-promises-to-make-the-game-more-queer-1798401117
 

Krivol

Magister
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Messages
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I have no problem with that - even if in my opinion fantasy pseudo-medieval world would be rather harsh for gays (especially two guys living in small village - it's not easy even today, for fucks sake and we are talking about worlds where perilious monsters are roaming every crop field, so rednecks don't want to bother with someones "Hi, I'm Mizogina, I'm gay"), I can allways change such details as DM.
 
Joined
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Vostroya
In librul news...

Dungeons & Dragons Promises To Make Its Adventures More Queer

As we sat together at Gen Con in Indianapolis this weekend talking Dungeons & Dragons, the game’s lead rules developer Jeremy Crawford motioned towards a copy of the Player’s Handbook resting on the table between us. “I wasn’t about to have this book go out and not acknowledge that people like me exist,” he said.

[This story contains spoilers for the D&D adventures Storm King’s Thunder and Curse of Strahd]

In the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Storm King’s Thunder, which Crawford helped publish in 2016, three enormous rocks have crushed the Osstra family’s farm in the abandoned village of Nightstone, spurring them to flee the town. And because this is D&D, the Osstra family and their neighbors were quickly captured by goblins and dragged to a cave. If players choose to rescue Nightstone’s villagers, they’ll meet the 52-year-old wheat farmer Thelbin Osstra, his husband Brynn, and Brynn’s adopted nephew Broland.

“That was a nod specifically to our household,” Crawford said of himself, his husband, and his nephew, who lived with them in 2016 when Storm King’s Thunder was in development. “Although the two men are older than my husband and I are,” he added, laughing.
Seated outside a D&D app demonstration and a busy Starbucks at this annual gathering of D&D heads, tabletop fanatics, and grown adults wearing capes, Crawford told me that publisher Wizards of the Coast is making D&D more gay, and why that’s a great thing. Although the original game was created by two men who were, at one point, conservative Christians, the current team behind D&D is, 40 years later, making an effort to accommodate everyone’s escapist fantasies, not just those of its earliest fans.

What was a scattering of queer characters throughout the years formalized into a guiding principle with 2016’s Curse of Strahd, an adventure that has players take down the vampire Count Strahd. Players can persuade the spellcaster Sir Godfrey Gwilym to join their quest toward Strahd. In the course of said quest, they will encounter Vladimir Horngaard, a commander who was, long ago, his lover. When players find Horngaard, his body is slumped in a throne, ready to fight. If Sir Godfrey accompanies them into battle, a tender and painful moment of recognition may follow.
Every adventure since Curse of Strahd has included one or several queer characters, and Crawford assured Kotaku that this will be a constant into future adventures: “Ever since we brought our adventure design fully back in-house,” he said, “all of our new adventures contain LGBT characters. This is true of our next adventure, Tomb of Annihilation, and it will be true of our stories after that.”

Weaving queer plotlines into D&D games is not hard to do. A passing mention of a same-sex couple might be enough to assert that queer sexuality is a natural part of the D&D universe. And instead of relying on stereotypes or fixating on their sexuality, these characters’ fleshed-out backstories make them people, not icons. Take the Triboar native and retired adventurer Urgala Meltimer, whose wizard wife never returned from the Underdark, whom Crawford says may appear again at a later date so players can solve the mystery of her disappearance.

If you think about D&D’s core values for even a moment, Crawford explained, it’s clear that one of its messages is that the best group is the most diverse group. “You don’t want a party where everyone’s the same,” he said. “It’s a game where you’re always better off working together, working through your differences and achieving victory together, even when you sometimes disagree. So in so many ways a lot of what we’re doing are lessons from D&D itself.”

An impetus for dungeon masters to make games more inclusive exists in D&D’s 5th edition ruleset, which asks players to look beyond sexuality and gender binaries when it comes to character creation: “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior,” it reads.

“It’s important to many of us personally in the company for the game to acknowledge our existence,” Crawford said of publisher Wizards of the Coast, which marched at Seattle’s Gay Pride parade for the first time this year. “It makes a real difference in people’s lives.”

Source: http://kotaku.com/dungeons-dragons-promises-to-make-the-game-more-queer-1798401117
Better to archive cocktaku links. http://archive.li/8EHOP
Also I lol'd:
Seated outside a D&D app demonstration and a busy Starbucks at this annual gathering of D&D heads, tabletop fanatics, and grown adults wearing capes, Crawford told me that publisher Wizards of the Coast is making D&D more gay, and why that’s a great thing. Although the original game was created by two men who were, at one point, conservative Christians, the current team behind D&D is, 40 years later, making an effort to accommodate everyone’s escapist fantasies, not just those of its earliest fans.

An impetus for dungeon masters to make games more inclusive exists in D&D’s 5th edition ruleset, which asks players to look beyond sexuality and gender binaries when it comes to character creation: “Think about how your character does or does not conform to the broader culture’s expectations of sex, gender, and sexual behavior,” it reads.
 

Melan

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! I helped put crap in Monomyth
That's pretty telling. For what it's worth, neither Gygax nor Arneson were into D&D for "escapist fantasies". They liked games, they liked violent adventure stories, and created something combining the two. They weren't interested in "escaping" to fantasy worlds (and Gygax was vehemently against the 'amateur thespian' school of roleplaying).

Poor D&D. It went through one ideological purge in the 80s to placate concerned suburban moms and Tipper Gore, and now it is going through another one to placate rainbow-haired freaks and people who don't know if they are men or women.
 

DavidBVal

4 Dimension Games
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Pathfinder: Wrath
But but but..... D&D already had genderbender characters in 1st edition!!!

b3ubues.jpg
 

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