The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:

Lago wrote:5E D&D's big innovation was to make straight hit-point damage without the rigmarole of save-or-dies a viable solution for parties.

How could you possibly list that as an innovation for 5th edition when it was the defining trait of 4th edition?

-Username17

Eh? What's this about a 4th Edition? Far as I know, D&D had a Leisure Suit Larry thing going on where they just straight-up went from 3.5E to 5E. This sounds highly improbable, Frank.

Sure, you can combine splatbooks and magic items to create The Ultimate Nuker, but you can do that in 3e by being an incantatrix with a metamagic rod. 5e makes that worse by making sure you can't get magic items you need AND making multiclassing (I see those warlock class features in your wizard) optional.

I'm amused at you bringing this up. I play 5E D&D fairly often (about twice a week) and I have to say that the divergence in the way the game is expected to be played and how it's actually played is crazy. For example, magical items are much more common in published play and even in homebrew games than any of the 5E D&D veterans care to admit. I got so fed up with the erroneous assumption of 'no magical items, single-class only, Final Destination' that I wrote the first and probably the only 5E D&D class guide that fully went through the magical item catalog.

Last night I was invited to join a group for some 5E D&D. I said NO THANKS.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I wrote the first and probably the only 5E D&D class guide that fully went through the magical item catalog.

I would be interested in reading that.

infected slut princess wrote:Last night I was invited to join a group for some 5E D&D. I said NO THANKS.

If they're really easy going, allow third party and homebrew content after its been reviewed, and use some sort of houserule to allow more character customization - I'm down to play some 5e.

Not having to coordinate and plan for tons of prerequisites in advance is a major draw to me as a player (I don't enjoy designing a 1-20 build before session 1, and 3.5 and Pathfinder make me feel like I'm getting shafted if I don't do that), and with gratuitously added custom content the game can be pretty fun (though the monster design is admittedly less than impressive).

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

Sure, you can combine splatbooks and magic items to create The Ultimate Nuker, but you can do that in 3e by being an incantatrix with a metamagic rod. 5e makes that worse by making sure you can't get magic items you need AND making multiclassing (I see those warlock class features in your wizard) optional.

I'm amused at you bringing this up. I play 5E D&D fairly often (about twice a week) and I have to say that the divergence in the way the game is expected to be played and how it's actually played is crazy. For example, magical items are much more common in published play and even in homebrew games than any of the 5E D&D veterans care to admit. I got so fed up with the erroneous assumption of 'no magical items, single-class only, Final Destination' that I wrote the first and probably the only 5E D&D class guide that fully went through the magical item catalog.

Indeed, plus it's really weird to see 3.X players complain about magic item distribution when in 3e and 3.5 "core RAW final destination only" magic item distribution is shit anyway so you probably already homebrewed a system for better magic item distribution and can just tackle it on 5e.

In 3.0 and 3.5 There are very clear WBL rules though, and they don't make it very hard to sell stuff at large cities and buy what you actually need when you get a bunch of random junk.

I wouldn't call it ideal, but it makes more sense than 5e's totally different standards for building a higher level character vs playing from the beginning.

The 3e era WBL is much too low, and shopping for kit is, well, it has a lot of downsides, like how you don't own an Apparatus of Kwalish at all, and probably also sold that Cloak of the Bat for another +1 somewhere..

With the 3.5 changes, officially you're supposed to reduce treasure rewards for everyone who gets above the recommended level, so it's not just too low, it forces the character types that traditionally need items to keep up, to instead just be very, very bad.

As an idea, there's probably some changes to make it work, and I'm not sure it's less changes than making any other system work. Like 1st edition where you dump excess magic items for XP rewards, but only get what you find, that could do with a suggested level to have a +1 sword at, but the 1e DMG does already have that as a rule. It also has problems, the treasure tables from 3e in some ways are much better arranged, but yeah.

5E D&D is already moving in a direction of being able to buy magical items.

Tomb of Annihilation gives you the opportunity to buy scrolls and a magic shield in the starting town. And if you're playing Adventurer's League, there's a way to spend gold and downtime days to get +1 equipment and a small assortment of magical items depending on your faction.

Obviously there aren't any guidelines to this shit. Storm King's Thunder, Hord of the Dragon Queen, and Tales of the Yawning Portal are difficult, but they drop a king's ransom in gold pieces AND magical items. Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation are generous with magical items, too, but they pay a pittance.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Obviously there aren't any guidelines to this shit.

5e in a nutshell, really.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation are generous with magical items, too, but they pay a pittance.

I'm sorry, what? My group walked out of Curse of Strahd with over ten thousand platinum.

Grek wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation are generous with magical items, too, but they pay a pittance.

I'm sorry, what? My group walked out of Curse of Strahd with over ten thousand platinum.

Yeah, near the end of the damn adventure. But until then you're not earning that much. Which is weird because the adventure is otherwise swimming in magical items.

What do you guys think of the monster creation rules in Oath of the Frozen King?

They seem potentially better than the MM ones, albeit not perfect.

I'm also curious about the above Monster Creation rules in Oath of Frozen King.

Otherwise, should we care about this? Seems like they're referring to Board games, and likely other non-RPG related stuff in regards to D&D. Rather the brand is becoming a bit more popular, but not necessarily more people playing/buying it (I suspect this might also be old news, or similar rhetoric we had some pages ago).

Aryxbez wrote:I'm also curious about the above Monster Creation rules in Oath of Frozen King.

Otherwise, should we care about this? Seems like they're referring to Board games, and likely other non-RPG related stuff in regards to D&D. Rather the brand is becoming a bit more popular, but not necessarily more people playing/buying it (I suspect this might also be old news, or similar rhetoric we had some pages ago).

"A spokesperson for Hasbro later clarified that while the strategy for building digital gaming capabilities for "Dungeons & Dragons" remains intact, the game has not yet been classified by the company as an esport because of its limited competitive scope."

Yet.

Tomb of Horrors pro circuit when

Jim Kramer wrote:Bear Stearns is fine... Bear Stearns is not in trouble. Don’t be silly... don’t move your money.

People do not go on Jim Kramer in order to say their product, company, or brand isn't doing well. They do it to pump up their stock prices by shilling to rubes.

Now you may wonder why, ten years after the Great Recession, Jim Kramer still has a job. And that would be a real puzzle if his job was to be an Oracle and make accurate predictions. But it's not. Jim Kramer is a priest, and his job is to make pronouncements that the ruling class want to hear. Accuracy is beside the point. Indeed, if mere accuracy would make 1%s feel good about themselves and their future, they wouldn't need someone like Jim Kramer.

Now on the specifics of this interview, the WotC guy is obviously using very strange metrics, so we can probably safely say he's talking out of his ass. What the actual fuck is a double digit increase in new players? That appears to mean that whatever calculated number of new players from one undefined time period is at least 10% higher than the calculated number of new players from some other undefined time period. That's... better than it being the other way around I suppose. But we're still in a period that comes after the collapse of fourth edition. There was a period when there wasn't any D&D product being released at all, and the number of new players was probably quite small.

Another issue is the idea of Dungeons & Dragons being more popular than ever before. People only really stop being aware of D&D when they die, so while there is definitely a non-zero attrition of D&D people every year, for the foreseeable future it would be really weird and bad if the total number of D&D-aware people didn't go up. D&D's "popularity" should go up for several decades. The teenage players from the big expansion in the 80s are in their forties and fifties, and they won't experience generational dieoff for a few decades. It should be at least twenty years before there's any year when there's much of a chance of D&D being "less popular" than it was the year before.

-Username17

WiserOdin032402 wrote:Tomb of Horrors pro circuit when

I cannot think of a less entertaining idea, unless they just straight turn it into competitive fellatio.

FrankTrollman wrote: What the actual fuck is a double digit increase in new players?

Between 10 and 99 new players?

A competitive D&D circuit would be amazing because it would actually encourage critical thinking and discussions of the rules, rather than "well I like that I paid $50 to not have a skill system, why are you such a rollplayer?"

I agree. Competitive dungeon delving (not a race, but some kind of points-based competition with 4-man teams) would make for an environment with very closely evaluated and tweaked rules.

In addition to Oath of the Frozen Throne, Blog of Holding also just released new monster creation rules based on analyzing the published monsters.

http://blogofholding.com/?p=7338

Discuss

Living Greyhawk had special event modules for stuff like gencon where you sort of competed by having pissing contests with other tables about how far they got in the dungeon and what loot/achievements they got. Could easily be adapted to a tournament style though often the DM matters as much as players as there are grey rules areas, varying tactical prowess, and asshole DMs. And if there’s real stakes for tournaments then you’ll want better controls.

I had LG DMs ignore module rules/design because they thought their idea was better. I’ve had a notoriously “killer DM” dominate my character no save because he hated that I had a paladin/bard (Despite my high falutin saves). I had another in a special event throw a second big bad monster at us (against module as written) because i metagamed aloud that there couldn’t be a second since it would be over the encounter limit. I wasn’t salty at the second because even tho he was cheating in a special event it was a funny comeuppance. But if it was for prizes I could see people being upset instead of being a fond memory.

Yeah, youd need very black and white rules, and perhaps a computer DM.

Talked to the main RPG book distributor in Thailand, he said Stranger Things lead to a noticeable increase in D&D5e sales. tabletop RPG's aren't super huge here, but it went from "Yeah there's under 100 people buying regularly" to "There's hundreds of people buying regularly"

I definitely noticed the uptick. I went from having one newish guy who kinda played dnd before to having about 4 new players jockeying for any open seat at my primary game. A friend even brought2 of his brothers to sit in just to observe the game just last month. Good times.

anyone denying the fact that the increase in people playing d&d is huge are deluding themselves. does that make 5e a good game? no. could they sell way more stuff? probably. why are they not doing it? noone knows.

i'm starting another new campaign with 2 new groups soon. of course i chose d&d5, cause i explicitly wanted new players to get into roleplaying. i had more applications than i can handle, several of them with no rpg-experience at all. d&d5 beats any other system in getting new people to the table, their marketing is clearly working.

On the topic of "competitive dungeon delving," I'd totally watch/run a home game of "Game Design by Algorithmic Evolution: World's Largest Dungeon Edition."

The dungeons would get better, and so would the system! Trial by fire is the only way!