The Gaming Den

People are trying to compare 5e monsters to monsters of equal CR in 3e, and this doesn't work, because 5e CR is batfuck insane and makes no sense. Remember, the DMG encounter guidelines (which came out after the MM) work off the XP totals of the monsters, not their actual CR.

For bonus points look at the crack rock numbers of the custom monster table. Off the top of my head 1/8 CR critters get to run around with 35 hp.

This takes us right back to the 3.5 paradigm people hated where when the bloat gets too high people break out the CC spells. People get upset when you break out the hypnotic pattern and get confused when you point out fireball is a garbage waste of time and spell slots, but if you're going to be running a bunch of encounters in a day we all know the right answer.

I legit have no idea what information was supposed to be conveyed by Challenge Rating in 5th edition. It doesn't correspond to anything at all.

-Username17

TheGreatEvilKing wrote:People are trying to compare 5e monsters to monsters of equal CR in 3e, and this doesn't work, because 5e CR is batfuck insane and makes no sense. Remember, the DMG encounter guidelines (which came out after the MM) work off the XP totals of the monsters, not their actual CR.

I'm glad I've never tried to DM 5e. 4e did the XP total thing, but it didn't have CRs and instead used levels. X creatures of level Y were your average difficulty encounter for X players of level Y.

So with 5e you're supposed to compare monsters by total XP, and that's somehow unrelated to this CR number? Didn't they release monster creation guidelines that specify how you build a monster and calculate CR and XP? How can those two numbers not be related!?

Supposedly, and I do mean supposedly, D&D 5e CR is supposed to work off of what a standard party of 4 is able to deal with at the level shown by the CR number. What that means is that a party of level 1's is supposed to have one CR 1 encounter per day and that uses up all of their resources or some nonsense like that.

It's basically a boss monster system thing? Individual boss monsters have been unworkable since forever, so I don't know why anyone would try to make it work.

FrankTrollman wrote:I legit have no idea what information was supposed to be conveyed by Challenge Rating in 5th edition. It doesn't correspond to anything at all.

-Username17

Remember when they delayed the DMG to after the PHB and MM? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Or, more appropriately to this discussion, I'm pretty sure the DMG XP table was a desperate attempt to retcon Challenge Rating out of existence while Mearls frantically deleted all the pornography he'd been watching off the company computers so he could plausibly claim he was working.

TheGreatEvilKing wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:I legit have no idea what information was supposed to be conveyed by Challenge Rating in 5th edition. It doesn't correspond to anything at all.

-Username17

Remember when they delayed the DMG to after the PHB and MM? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Or, more appropriately to this discussion, I'm pretty sure the DMG XP table was a desperate attempt to retcon Challenge Rating out of existence while Mearls frantically deleted all the pornography he'd been watching off the company computers so he could plausibly claim he was working.

I know this is a joke, but is this based off a Ted Cruz-style accidental upvote?

The questions of "How does Mearls still have a job?" and "What the hell does Mearls do all day?" are closely linked. If he was judged on the quantity or quality of his D&D writing, you'd think he would have been fired a long time ago.

His early stuff like Iron Heroes was released in a form that even Mearls admits is incomplete and functionally unworkable. But it "showed promise" and he got a job working for WotC. Working for WotC he spearheaded a lot of the fundamental concepts of 4th edition and you'd think that would have gotten him a pink slip, but back then he was outputting 20-30 thousand words of hack writing a week and that reliably high output kept him employed even though much of that output was just him trying and failing to fix Skill Challenges over and over again.

But in 5th edition, he isn't writing stuff. Total output is so low that they aren't writing twenty thousand words a week for the entire department. One hack writer could complete four to six books a year, and they aren't doing that. So what exactly does Mearls do at the office all day? How has he stayed employed for the last five years? It's a mystery.

My belief is that WotC just doesn't care about the D&D books at all, and is only concerned about "the brand" which to them means getting Dungeons & Dragons logos on shirts and other merchandise. If you go to the official webpage, the last "news" is from November 4th, and it's a single article about class variants. It's fucking Christmas and there's not a book to buy or even an article about holiday themed monsters or something. It's fucking mind blowing. But if you go to the products pages, there is a new Dungeon Mayhem expansion coming, and a dice set, and various other shit.

So I think that's what Mearls does all day. He talks to people in other departments and tries to get them to make D&D licensed versions of whatever the hell they are already making and coasts on the popularity of Stranger Things.

-Username17

So while the latest entry in the "News" section is from November 4th, they've actually released an Eberron setting book since then. There's even articles related it, but they don't appear on the front page at all, which leads to a different question: how has nobody noticed that their front page hasn't updated in the last month and a half?

The idea that companies are run based on output or profitability is an outdated fiction. Only the owners care about profit. Only the lowest level employees are conned into caring about their output. The vast majority of decisions are made by middle managers, and they're rewarded by being useful to the managers above them. The need to turn a profit only matters insomuch as that somebody at the top of that chain needs to report to the owners.

Mearls is clearly useful to the people he reports to, and there are hundreds of ways this could have happened. To hazard a guess, whoever he reports to benefits from managing the person in charge of a large brand like D&D, but would have that department poached out from under them if D&D had a larger organization that actually did stuff.

zeruslord wrote:So while the latest entry in the "News" section is from November 4th, they've actually released an Eberron setting book since then. There's even articles related it, but they don't appear on the front page at all, which leads to a different question: how has nobody noticed that their front page hasn't updated in the last month and a half?

I tend to notice that the first news of 5th Edition releases is on comicbook.com of all places. And sometimes this is in turn based on some Amazon page for a pre-order.

I get the feeling that Eberron's release was a bit reluctant on WotC's part; they initially only focused on Forgotten Realms and threw Ravenloft a bone but in the vein of it being an adventure and not a setting. Some Realmslore fans I know were a bit miffed at the Elemental Evil adventure (originally Greyhawk) being crammed into the Realms, given how blatant it was at cannibalizing other settings into Elminsterland.

Although I don't know of anything close to an official statement on this, the line of thinking was that fans would do the conversions themselves with the wealth of previous Edition sourcebooks. But fans love official content if only to show that their setting's not dead and expose it to the new generations of players (and the Critical Role audience).

Eberron's promotion to 5E was the result of years' worth of Keith Baker and fans petitioning WotC and gathering support, and things like Morgrave Miscellany (which was written by Baker himself) selling like hotcakes on the DM's Guild.

I recall a #krynnisready hashtag among Dragonlance fans responding to either Mearls or Perkins stating that the setting doesn't have interesting material beyond the original adventures. It was a bit of a polite way of showing that they're wrong by highlighting all the other stuff published for DL. Unlike Eberron it didn't get anywhere, alas.

Comicbook.com recently copied something I said about the Gundam GM Spartan inspiring Halo, they snoop around here and there

Without wanting to sound like a shill I think Rising from the Last War is a step in the right direction for 5e, and to learn that the release of Eberron with little fanfare from Wizards is concern, especially with how much content is packed into the book itself. It has pages upon pages of adventure hooks and player facing content and setting mechanics, it has a whole new class, an entire mini-bestiary, tons of tables for generating adventures, and even entire dungeons mapped out.

However, I have a sneaking suspicion that Eberron isn't going to get any modules in this edition, and I think this might be the only official Eberron book made for this edition, which is a shame given how much it basically tells all the bullshit about magic items in the DMG to go fuck itself.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Oh, they play 5e for a while. They just get bored.

Can confirm. My group consists of people entirely too "toxic" and "problematic" for the general public, and we all got bored with 5e relatively quickly. I just wish I could convince them to play something that isn't Pathfinder.

FrankTrollman wrote: Working for WotC he spearheaded a lot of the fundamental concepts of 4th edition

This is wrong, Heinsoo was in charge of 4e initially.

Essentials was Mearls baby and marks a sharp drop in the quality of 4e books.

FrankTrollman wrote: If you go to the official webpage, the last "news" is from November 4th, and it's a single article about class variants. It's fucking Christmas and there's not a book to buy or even an article about holiday themed monsters or something. It's fucking mind blowing. But if you go to the products pages, there is a new Dungeon Mayhem expansion coming, and a dice set, and various other shit.

Dammit, I looked this up last night while talking to a friend and looked like a fool when I found out that the new Eberron shit is right there on the front page.
... underneath a larger advertisement for a D&D co-op video game. I think it's safe to say WotC doesn't actually give a single shit about D&D, the tabletop game.