Review: D&D 5E Dungeon Master's Guide

[RelentlessImp]

5E: The Cargo Cult RPG.

True whether it's D&D or Shadowrun at this point.

[Username17]

Sure. You can define 'hex fetishism' as the deliberate choice to reduce hexes to an ornamental device stripped of all their core functions.
Mearls introduced hex fetishism to the official D&D product line with 4E's Hammerfast.

Now replace 'hex' with a set of the nouns n designating meaningful core mechanics in D&D, where a necessary condition for 'meaningful' is the facilitation of character-world interaction.

It is then possible to identify 5E as mostly a collection of n-fetishisms.

4e was guilty of a different set of fetishisms. 4E didn't so much map (hitherto) meaningful mechanics onto meaningless ones, but mapped names designating D&D flavour elements with mythological depth onto a mythologically thin and incoherent mess ('re-skinning', 'culture blind fun').

I would say that 4e did make mechanics meaningless as well. Just as 5e presents hexes as an empty shell, so too did 4e insist on having things like "Saving Throws" that were absolutely pointless. It's not a meaningful part of the game, it's just a reference to mechanics that were important in other editions.

As for your old RPGsite post, I would point out that you were only scratching the surface when you noted that 4e sold like herpes hotpockets in Germany. We no know that it sold poorly everywhere. We don't have to look at peculiarities of German culture as to why they rejected 4e, because everyone rejected 4e. The 4th edition was simply a hot mess of incomplete mechanics and lazy fluff. No one fucking liked it. Word of mouth was terrible. After the big sales numbers of the opening week, the cliff was so bad that they fired the head of D&D every year for the edition's entire life.

People expect D&D to be heavily designed, and 4e and 5e were both half-assed rush jobs that are anything but. 4e shouldn't have been like that, they were working on it for four years and had a massive development budget. But for whatever reason they scrapped the early designs entirely with just a few months to go on the deadline and scraped together a new product at the last minute. Most people can't evaluate the rules carefully enough to realize what's wrong with these things, but they can still play around with them and see that the outputs are shit.

-Username17

[Windjammer]

As for your old RPGsite post, I would point out that you were only scratching the surface when you noted that 4e sold like herpes hotpockets in Germany. We no know that it sold poorly everywhere. We don't have to look at peculiarities of German culture as to why they rejected 4e, because everyone rejected 4e. The 4th edition was simply a hot mess of incomplete mechanics and lazy fluff.

Quite true. That post was written in late 2008 when it seemed the German market was an oddity; the licenser jumped ship while already having translated the core books and Shadowfell. (The 2008 GamesDay PDF still exists as a freebie, and you can see the licensee did not simply translate texts but layouted the whole thing etc.) Core books were released - the end. Then Pathfinder comes up, and the Germans translate and sell it like crazy - a huge portion of the line. So the German scene played out the US sales narrative much quicker, for largely unrelated and unpredictable reasons.

Which brings us to 5e. The edition that isn't translated, and for which WotC says it's not willing to even negotiate translations. (Lack of manpower overseeing quality control?) But it's selling ok in Germany, where D&D is niche and 3e never sold crazy either. And that's slightly worrying, because it indicates that the Germans can't stand lore-fetishisms, but they don't have any investment in D&D mechanics, and so can stand their dilution.

And yes you're right that 4e started mechanical dilution. Personally I only began to notice it with Essentials, which had sort of weird class names that made no sense; power names in Psionic Power; and some weird stuff in the PH 3. So late in the game. But of course, if one looks for these things, they're there early too.

[Grek]

Chapter Two: Creating a Multiverse

Despite the name, this chapter is mostly a description of the default 5E cosmology and the Great Wheel in particular.

While there are gestures in the direction of making your own custom cosmology, the book doesn't really go into the details of what doing that would entail.

The book does list some basic requirements for building your own cosmology: You need, at a minimum, an Ethereal analog for incorporeal creatures to exist, an Astral analog for spells like Astral Projection to exist, somewhere for fiends, elementals and celestials to come from, and some sort of stance on where gods/souls fit into all of that.
But the very next section flouts that by suggesting that it's perfectly possible to have a One World model where all planes are locations on Prime. How that's supposed to interact with incorporeal creatures, I haven't a clue, and honestly it suggests that at least two different authors wrote for this section without collaboration.

Next is a two page section entitled "Planar Travel", which covers both Portals and Spells. The portal section is mostly about suggestions for how the DM can turn access to a portal into an adventure from requiring a key, to putting the portal in some exotic location, to putting a guardian in front of the portal that needs defeated to cross. What's missing is advice on what choices are good for what sort of adventure. Is there any time when a Random Portal (allows 1d6+6 creatures to pass through in either direction every 1d6 days) would be a good idea to include in an adventure? I can't think of any.

The spells section is similarly sparse, covering Plane Shift and Gate as the only spells of note. Plane Shift in 5E requires a tuning fork focus and, optionally, the rune sequence for a teleport circle on the target plane. If you fail to provide a rune sequence, you end up within sight of your destination and the DM is encouraged to stick some monsters or obstacles in your way. Gate gets even less coverage. The book simply says that Gate lets you "bypass many of the guardians and trials that would normally fill such a journey. But this is a 9th level spell and is out of reach for all but the most powerful characters. A deity, demon lord or other powerful entity can prevent a portal from opening within its domain." What a copout.

The rest of the chapter describes various planes that you might use, which just so happen to be the exact ones involved in the Great Wheel/Planescape cosmology, right down to Sigil getting a writeup. While I don't object to using Planescape's planes, I wish the book wouldn't have spent 5 pages pretending to give a shit about other cosmological setups. I'm sure that a better use for that particular bit of wordcount count have been found elsewhere.

Our planes list for 5E is:

• Astral Old School Color Pools are back in 5E, as are random "encounters" in the form of rolling on the Psychic Wind table whenever the DM decides they want to.
• Ethereal Much like 3E, there's no real conceptual divide between Astral and Ethereal beyond the fact that Ethereal has ghosts and Astral doesn't. Notably, both Psychic Wind and Ether Cyclones can send you back and forth between the two planes.
• Feywild A 4E idea. Optional Rules include Memory Loss and Rumplestiltskin-style time warps. I think we all know why this is a bad idea.
• Shadowfell Another 4Eism. Optional rule is Shadowfell Despair. Claims to contain the Ravenloft setting.
• Elemental The only one of these to get a map. See below for details.
• Celestia Optional Rule: Good creatures are subject to Bless and Lesser Restoration when completing long rests.
• Bytopia Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. becoming Lawful Good each long rest. Becomes permanent in 1d4 days if you don't leave.
• Elysium Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. Entrapment every long rest. Becomes permanent if you fail 3 times in a row.
• Beastlands Optional Rule: Everyone gets advantage when hunting, but if you kill an animal you get polymorphed into that animal. You get three DC 10 saves before it becomes permanent.
• Arborea Optional Rule: Once you leave, you get a DC 5 + number of days spent on Arborea Charisma save vs wanting to return.
• Ysgard Optional Rule: If you get killed on Ysgard, you come back to life at dawn.
• Limbo Optional Rule: Intelligence checks let you move/transmute/stabilize the chaos into things. DCs are very low.
• Pandemonium Optional Rule: The winds on this plane give you levels in Exhaustion, but levels in exhaustion on Pandemonim make you go crazy instead of dying. So people can't starve on Pandemonium, but do go mad.
• Abyss Optional Rule: Abyssal Corruption. DC 10 save vs gaining a randomly generated flaw that requires you to be a dick to the party followed by a DC 15 check vs becoming chaotic evil. Yes, really.
• Carceri Optional Rule: Planar magic that is not Wish cannot get you out of Carceri.
• Hades Optional Rule: DC 10 save vs exhaustion. Instead of dying of exhaustion on Hades, you turn into a larva. Stats are provided.
• Gehenna Optional Rule: Casting buff spells requires a DC 10 save or have them fizzle.
• Nine Hells Optional Rule: DC 10 save vs becoming Lawful Evil, becomes permanent in ld4 days yadayada.
• Acheron Optional Rule: If you kill someone, you get half their HP in temporary hitpoints.
• Mechanus Optional Rule: Save vs becoming Lawful Neutral. Also, all random damage gives the mean result every time. Yes, really.
• Arcadia Optional Rule: Everyone here is immune to fear, disease and poison. For no reason.
• Sigil Is given over to a brief summary of the Planescape setting which somehow manages to avoid any mention of factions.
• The Demiplanes Also claims to contain the Ravenloft setting.
• Far Realm Is given an utterly useless writeup with no rules. Mindflayers and beholders are probably from here.

which is obviously way too many to talk about individually in any real depth. So instead I'm going just list their Optional Rules for the amusement of all of you reading and finish out this section of the review by trying to explain how Elemental ended up in its current state.

Basic D&D has four widely accepted elemental planes: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. There were also the Positive and Negative planes which aren't elemental, but are in the same area. AD&D introduced the Paraelemental planes (Smoke, Ooze, Magma and Ice) as well as the Quasielemental planes (Lightning, Mineral, Radiance, Steam, Vacuum, Dust, Ash and Salt). 3E simplified these away. 3.5E tried to bring them back. 4E tried to condense it all into a single "Elemental Chaos" which was also Limbo and also Ethereal and also the Abyss. This was generally regarded as a stupid idea. 5E apparently wants us to believe in an inner plane situation that looks like this:

We have the four basic Elemental Planes, each of which has various named geographical locations inside. We then have border zones between them which take on the properties of the paraelemental planes. In the middle is your Material plane of choice (flanked by Feywild, Shadowfell and presumably the Ethereal planes) while off the map is the "Elemental Chaos" where everything is random mashups of every element mixed together. Notably, everywhere on elemental has objective, prime-strength gravity, land below you and sky above you.

While this is obviously intended to be a compromise position between all the other elemental models out there, it's a compromise I can get behind. Elemental planes honestly don't need to be infinite, merely "very big", and putting Fire next to Air gives an excuse for the whole Efreet/Djinn conflict that we're supposed to care about. Likewise, by making the boundary between the Elemental Planes be stuff like "a whole, whole bunch of volcanoes" or "the world's biggest wall of ice", you make it at least theoretically plausible that a mundane/martial character might travel the planes without magical assistance, simply by getting in a boat and sailing their way onto the Elemental Plane of Water. That's a good thing.

[Antariuk]

• Astral Old School Color Pools are back in 5E, as are random "encounters" in the form of rolling on the Physic Wind table whenever the DM decides they want to.

As someone who never played the old editions: what are color pools?

Thanks for the review so far!

[schpeelah]

While this is obviously intended to be a compromise position between all the other elemental models out there, it's a compromise I can get behind. Elemental planes honestly don't need to be infinite, merely "very big", and putting Fire next to Air gives an excuse for the whole Efreet/Djinn conflict that we're supposed to care about. Likewise, by making the boundary between the Elemental Planes be stuff like "a whole, whole bunch of volcanoes" or "the world's biggest wall of ice", you make it at least theoretically plausible that a mundane/martial character might travel the planes without magical assistance, simply by getting in a boat and sailing their way onto the Elemental Plane of Water. That's a good thing.

How far would that get you though? I would expect most of the important things to be underwater there anyway.

I really feel a very obvious improvement to this geography would be to put Air as the sky of all the others, which would also free Ice to be the Water/Earth boundary. No one's interested in elemental mud.

As someone who never played the old editions: what are color pools?

Randomly spawning portals just hanging in the void. They look look you'd imagine, color based on the plane they lead to. Ethereal had equivalent color vapor curtains.

[Grek]

Pretty far, considering there's Genies living in elemental land. Obviously you wouldn't go for Water first if you didn't have waterbreathing, but you can sail through Water to Dao or Djinn lands.

As for moving Air into the sky, that would be perfectly workable if 5E's elemental planes design wasn't intended as a compromise between AD&D and 4E. Making the arrangement into a pyramid means two new planar boundaries (Air/Earth and Fire/Water) which in turn means you don't have the one to one correspondence to the AD&D Paraelementals. Its a choice that they could (and arguably should) have made, but didn't.

[Kaelik]

Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?

[schpeelah]

Making the arrangement into a pyramid means two new planar boundaries (Air/Earth and Fire/Water) which in turn means you don't have the one to one correspondence to the AD&D Paraelementals. Its a choice that they could (and arguably should) have made, but didn't.

They already don't have a 1:1 correspondence, Ash was Negative / Fire. The Air/Fire paraelement was smoke. You don't need a new Air/Earth, the logic of making Air the sky is that there is no Air/anything boundary more logical than simply the surface.

Admittedly I haven't considered Water/Fire, I guess the Ash is wet on side now?

Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?

Floating islands.

[Kaelik]

Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?

Floating islands.

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If you jump from a floating island, what happens?

[hyzmarca]

Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?

Floating islands.

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If you jump from a floating island, what happens?

You fall.

Forever.

[OgreBattle]

Bytopia Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. becoming Lawful Good each long rest. Becomes permanent in 1d4 days if you don't leave.

Seems like a good place to build a prison/rehab center for demons.

[Grek]

Bytopia Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. becoming Lawful Good each long rest. Becomes permanent in 1d4 days if you don't leave.

Seems like a good place to build a prison/rehab center for demons.

You'd think so, but it really isn't. In 5e, taking a long rest is optional (you don't have to do it even if you've spent the requisite 8 hours resting) and demons don't have any particular motivation to do so. Remember, monster powers don't recharge on rests in 5E, they're completely divorced from the player rules. Even resting for healing doesn't matter, as demons who die in any location other than the Abyss just reform in the Abyss.

[erik]

Floating islands.

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If you jump from a floating island, what happens?

You fall.

Forever.

What, doesn't the air fall also and get denser until eventually you'll find a point of neutral buoyancy? That could be a more fun option.

[TiaC]

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If you jump from a floating island, what happens?

You fall.

Forever.

What, doesn't the air fall also and get denser until eventually you'll find a point of neutral buoyancy? That could be a more fun option.

No, because at that depth, the pressure would be immense.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Maybe you loop back around to the top, like how in older Final Fantasy games you were on a flat, looping plane instead of a sphere, except with up and down working like that too.

[Grek]

Chapter Three "Creating Adventures" is also the start of part two: Master of Adventures. It leads with an illustration of the Tarrasque juxtaposed with an illustration of Baba Yaga's hut:


After a few paragraphs of extraneous introduction about how great writing adventures is, we are presented with "Elements of a Great Adventure" which claims to be about things that good adventures all have in common, but which seems to have been written from the perspective of someone taking flaws that would make for a terrible adventure and then inverting them. For example, #3 is "A Clear Focus on the Present" which points out that, yes, the story needs to be about events happening now. And not, for example, a chance to learn about bits of setting lore which the GM will exposit at you as the "adventure" progresses. Its the sort of advice that had to have come from personal experience with a particularly railroady storytelling DM on the part of this section's author.

That said, nothing in this section is actually bad advice. Keep the story about the PCs and about events happening right now. Be creative and surprising, but don't take it to the point where the PCs stop trying to anticipate what will happen next because its just a chaotic mess. Draw maps if you can, or print maps off the internet if you can't. Use published adventures as a starting point, not as an adventure itinerary. None of it is 5E specific, or even D&D specific, but it doesn't go off on rants about punishing problem players or arbitrarily changing the rules on a whim like you'd expect.

Section two of the chapter is "Adventure Structure" and explains that every adventure needs a beginning with a strong adventure hook to get the party involved, a middle where the players are active participants whose interplay with the adventure's adversary shapes the plot, and an ending that hinges on what the adventurers actually did rather than on how the DM thinks the story should end. From there it segues into the next two sections by talking about the two types of adventure "Location Based" and "Event Based".

According to 5E, the first step in writing a Location Based Adventure is to figure out why the party is at that location and what would constitute a successful adventure there. There's three random tables provided, a d20 "Dungeon Goals" chart to roll if the location is a dungeon, a d20 "Wilderness Goals" chart for if you're outdoors someplace, and a d12 "Other Goals" chart for location based adventures that don't fit into either of those situations. The goals range from the obvious "Foil a villain's evil scheme" to the unusual "Win a bet by surviving in the dungeon for a set amount of time" to the obnoxious "Escort an NPC to a destination."

Next is important NPCs including the Villain, the Adventure Allies, and the Adventure Patrons. All of these get a random chart if you're stuck for ideas, as well as a pointer to Chapter 4 for instructions on how to make NPCs. Then you're told to go to Chapter 5 to make a good location and determine both the Introduction and the Climax of the adventure using, you guessed it, more random charts. Notable entries include "While traveling in the wilderness, a sinkhole drops you into the adventure location." and "The villain and 2-3 lieutenants perform separate rites in a large room; all rites must be disrupted at once." for the worst and best entries respectively.

Writing an Event Based Adventure follows a similar pattern. You're asked to roll up a villain, some important NPCs, a climax and an introduction as before, but this time you're also asked for the Villain's Goal, the Party's Goal (ranging from "bring them to justice" to "make sure a wedding goes off without the villain interfering") and to Anticipate the Villain's Reactions steps the party might take in opposition. Mysteries and Intrigues are both called out as special cases of the Event Based Adventure. In the first one, the Villain has already accomplished some sort of crime and the PCs are investigating for reasons related to their goal (maybe the groom is being detained for questioning?) while in the second one focuses mostly on making the DM picks an intrigue that the PCs will actually give a shit about.

How does all of it work in practice? Well, let's roll up a pair of adventures and find out:

Dungeon Based Adventure:
20. A villain posing as your patron has asked you to 5. find a particular item for a specific purpose, while being opposed by 17. a humanoid raider or ravager, and sent 5. a priest with you to help. You begin the adventure in 7. a town or village that needs volunteers, and end when 9. the dungeon begins to collapse while the adventurers face the main villain, who attempts to escape in the chaos.

Event Based Adventure:
17. A parent or other family member has asked you to 18. locate a stolen item belonging to 7. a friend seeking revenge. It was secretly taken by 14. a humanoid scheme seeking to rule who has 2. gone on some sort of crime spree. The adventure starts when the 9. PCs find a map to the stolen item on a dead body (the villain also wants the map) and ends when 6. an ally betrays the adventurers as they're about to recover the stolen item. (Use this climax carefully and don't overuse it). An enthusiastic commoner is sent to help.

The first is a bit cliche and the second seems like a mess. But you could transmute them into usable adventures:

Dungeon Based Adventure:
The King of Monkey Island has asked you to recover a holy relic in the Temple-Ship of the Sea God. A priest of Poseidon has been sent with you to identify the correct object. Once you return with the relic, the King raises the Jolly Roger, revealing that he was not the true King, but actually the Dread Pirate Gorillabeard! He fires upon the Temple-Ship (with the PCs upon it) as he sails away with the relic. The PCs must escape the now-sinking ship, board the MIS Apeshit and deal with the betrayer.

Event Based Adventure:
Your Old Dwarven Uncle has come across a dead body with a map leading to his magical axe that he lost in a battle against the Mine Kraken back before the Blacklung Tunnels were sealed to keep the Coal Demons from escaping. The mine's owner, knowing that the axe's magic would allow the Mine Kraken to be slain, hopes to wield its power (along with a collection of other stolen magic items), defeat the Kraken and use the profits from his reopened mines to fund his political ambitions. You, along with the grizzled old mine foreman, are sent to thwart this reckless scheme. If the party successfully defeats the mine owner, the foreman will betray the party by closing them in with the Mine Kraken, fearing possible contamination.

There's also tables for Framing Events, Complications, Twists and Side Quests. The complications are probably the best ones, while the "Twists" are almost all uniformly terrible.

The next section is "Creating Encounters" and is notable in that A] "defeat all the monsters" is noticeably missing from the listing of possible encounter objectives, and B] this is the part of the chapter where the encounter challenge rating table is located. The former is an unusual choice, but not an unreasonable one. Encounters probably should be about more than "kill all these monsters for XP and loot". But, given the way XP works in 5E, that's not really a viable option. You get XP for killing things, not for completing Encounter Objectives, and the "Adventure Day" isn't supposed to end until you've encountered a enough monsters to meet your level-based Adventuring Day XP quota.

"Creating a Combat Encounter" is the name of the section which details 5E's byzantine challenge rating system. The process is as follows:

• Step 1: Cross reference the level of each player with the Encounter Difficulty Chart to get a ste of XP Thresholds for that character. For example, an 8th level character has XP Thresholds of 450/900/1400/2100 for easy, normal, hard and deadly fights respectively..
• Step 2: Add the XP Thresholds for every player together. For example, a party of four 8th level characters comes out to 1800/3600/5600/8400.
• Step 3: Add up the XP value for each monster (as listed in their MM entry), after adjusting for the Encounter Multiplier that makes large swarms of monsters worth more XP than straight multiplication would suggest. For example, a Medusa (as seen in the art for this page) has an XP value of 2300, and the XP multiplier for having two of a creature is 1.5, so two Medusae should have a combined Encounter XP value of 6900.
• Step 4: Compare the total Monster XP to the Party XP Threshold. For example, 6900 is more than the Hard threshold for our theoretical 8th level party, but less than the Deadly Threshold. So, in theory it shouldn't be a TPK.

As you can see from the example, this system... doesn't particularly work. Two Medusae would outright murder a party of level 8 characters, as they have more hitpoints than the party combined, a comparable number of stronger attacks (6 total, vs the party's 4-8) that do more damage and have a passive petrification aura on top of that.

The rest of the chapter talks about random encounters. The advice isn't good, and can be best exemplified by the Triggering Random Encounters subsection, which instructs the DM to consider rolling on the random encounter table whenever "The players are getting off track and slowing down the game; the players take a rest; the characters are undertaking a long and uneventful journey; or the characters draw attention to themselves when they should be keeping a flow profile."

It ends with a picture of an owlbear. Enjoy:

[erik]

In that what-if part if the reason the pressure would be immense was because the air's density was much lower thanks to Jupiter's being hydrogen and helium vs. our nitrogen and oxygen mix. It's at 784 atm that our air becomes about as dense as water, which is still too much but nothing like the Jupiter question. We've sent crafts to higher pressures than that in the ocean.

I suppose it's a moving bar of how much reality you want to apply before you say "except this functions differently than reality". So fall forever, fall until you float, fall and wrap back around again. All are options.

[Grek]

As for the bottom of the Elemental Plane of Air, it's none of those things. It just has land below it. Quoth the DMG: "At their innermost edges, where they are closest to the Material Plane, the four Elementl Planes resemble places in the Material Plane. The four elements mingle together as they do in the Material Plane, forming land, sea and sky." Its only when you get out into the Elemental Chaos does there stop being land (except in the Elemental Chaos near Earth, where there's nothing but land) and you might fall into an endless abyss of cloudy infinitude.

[Korwin]

Which brings us to 5e. The edition that isn't translated, and for which WotC says it's not willing to even negotiate translations. (Lack of manpower overseeing quality control?) But it's selling ok in Germany, where D&D is niche and 3e never sold crazy either. And that's slightly worrying, because it indicates that the Germans can't stand lore-fetishisms, but they don't have any investment in D&D mechanics, and so can stand their dilution.

Not from Germany, but Austria.
But how can you say that? There are only 3 books for 5th edition.
4th Edition tanked after the core (3) books, right?

So how is 5e different to 4e? Both stopped selling.
(In my case, I bought the PHB an MM. Lost intereste before I got to the last one)

The only difference is, WotC stopped before the audience got an chance to lose interest. And thats arguable...

[Ghremdal]

Its been said on these boards before, but 5e is selling pretty much the same way 4e has been for its first year.

So about 150,000-200,000 books worldwide (PHB is the bulk at around 120,000). And thats all folks...I don't know how well the adventure paths are doing...not well I suppose. Reasoning is that even if every 5th person who bought a PHB buys every adventure path, that is still only 24,000 sold per adventure path, worldwide.

The telling thing is this: WotC DnD team has 6(8) full time employees. While Paizo has 60+ employees.

[nockermensch]

Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?

Floating islands.

That doesn't answer the question at all.

If you jump from a floating island, what happens?

It's floating islands all the way down.

[virgil]

Its been said on these boards before, but 5e is selling pretty much the same way 4e has been for its first year.

So about 150,000-200,000 books worldwide (PHB is the bulk at around 120,000). And thats all folks...I don't know how well the adventure paths are doing...not well I suppose. Reasoning is that even if every 5th person who bought a PHB buys every adventure path, that is still only 24,000 sold per adventure path, worldwide.

Do we actually have worldwide sales numbers for 5E outside of that one site I used that extrapolated from Amazon rankings?

[Grek]

Chapter 4, "Creating Nonplayer Characters" is a short one, weighing in at a mere 8 pages. Most of the content is charts, but it also has the two "Villainous Class Options" the Death Domain Cleric and the Oathbreaker Paladin. Since I have stuff to do today, and this is a short chapter, expect a short update.

The introduction of this chapter points out that, despite the title, this isn't the place you should look for giving your NPCs stats. Apparently that is covered in Chapter 9. Instead, everything in this chapter is about making your NPCs memorable and giving them personalities. Two basic methods are presented, the Quick NPC and the Detailed NPC.

For a Quick NPC, don't bother with stats or even a name, just roll twice on the appearance chart. Lets make some examples:
17 & 17: Distinctive Nose and Distinctive Nose. A baker with an enormous nose and silvery white nose hairs.
11 & 15: Birthmark and Unusual Hair Colour. An elf with a patch of piebald skin on the left side of her head.
01 & 07: Distinctive Jewelry and Missing Teeth. The troll with the cane and fancy golden tusk crowns.

For a detailed NPC, you're expected to write up ten sentences, one on each of the following topics:

• Occupation: No random table. "Sir Breadbeard is a Dwarven Knight of Underscone."
• Appearance: 17 & 2. "He has a lengthy nose sporting a diamond septum piercing."
• Abilities: 5 & 2. "Although he is tremendously wise, he is clumsy and graceless."
• Talent: 2. "He is fluent in Giant, Goblin, Elven, Drow and Mermish."
• Mannerism: 5. "Despite this, he has a tendency to over enunciate when speaking to other species."
• Interactions: 8. "This, along with Sir Breadbeard's famous temper, tends to get him into fights."
• Useful Knowledge: No random table. "Even so, he is well informed about the diplomatic situation here."
• Ideal: Based on alignment. 3 & 1. "Breadbeard backs whoever provides the greatest good to the Dwarven community."
• Bond: 5. "Recently, the good knight has been captivated by new romance."
• Flaw/Secret: 5. "As a result, he has sought out finery and riches to woo his secret love."

You're supposed to use the same method for generating monsters and antagonists. There's a detailed example given of a beholder named Xanathar who lives in Waterdeep, looks like his face was bashed in by a cobblestone at some point and has a habit for filling its sewer layer with finely scented oils and fragrant herbs. Sure, why not? There's a brief aside on how to generate statistics for your NPCs. The three methods provided are: "Don't. If it's not a combat encounter, it doesn't need stats."; "Start with a monster and then turn to Chapter 9." and "Build the NPC like it were a PC using the PC rules." This is rather sparse, but I hold out a (likely vain) hope that Chapter 9 will provide a usable framework for making NPCs. This gnome on the same page seems to be laughing at me for thinking so:



The next section is "NPC Party Members". In 5E, your NPCs get an equal share of the XP and "expect you to spend effort and resources protecting [them], and to provide healing when this protection fails." which shows 5E's AD&D dna rather plainly. In 3.5, the assumption is that you will not hire hirelings and that if you get minions some other way (cough cough clerics and wizards cough) that you'll treat them as expendable cannon fodder. There's even an optional rule for a "Loyalty Score" which determines when and if the NPC leaves or betrays the party. The maximum Loyalty for an NPC is equal to the highest Charisma in the party and goes up by 1d4 if you treat the NPC well, or goes down by 2d4 if you treat the NPC poorly. This seems like a needlessly complicated way of doing things.

Also included in this chapter, for reasons which escape me is the Random Villain's Scheme Table. You'd think this should have gone in the last chapter, but as with most of 5E editing is not really a strong point. Lets roll up some schemes:

A. The Villain seeks 8. wealth through 3. plundering ancient ruins. Their methods involve 20. warfare, particularly 3. a massacre. Their secret weakness is 1. the hidden object which houses their soul.
B. The Villain seeks 8. wealth through 1. control of natural resources or trade. Their methods involve 11. magical mayhem in the form of 2, illusions. Their secret weakness is 1. the hidden object which houses their soul.
C. The Villain seeks 5. passion through 3. restoring a dead loved one or life. Their methods involve 15. religion, particularly 3. the worship of false gods. Their secret weakness is 3. a particular artifact which weakens them.

So we have an evil deathknight hoping to murder all of the inhabitants of some ruins in order to take the money within; a lich involved in a Scooby Doo style magical extortion scheme and a crazed necromancer hoping to strike a pact with a false god, but who is defeated by a love poem from her dead husband. I could turn that into a campaign.

Rounding out the chapter are the two Villain Class Options. Neither seems particularly well thought out.

Death Domain cleric gets to learn "one necromancy cantrip from any spell list" and target two creatures with it instead of one. Unfortunately, there's only two necromancy cantrips in the whole game: Spare the Dying and Chill Touch. All of your powers work through melee weapons, and pretty much just give you extra necrotic damage on your attacks. You also get to learn some necromantic blasting abilities if you like, but honestly you don't care because all of the good necromancy spells were already on the Cleric list in the PHB.

Oathbreaker gives Paladins access to Crown of Madness, Animate Dead, Bestow Curse and ultimately Dominate Person. These are good spells, but Paladin is not a good spellcaster, given that they get fewer spell slots on a slower progression. That said, Oathbreakers DO get Command Undead (undead target gets a Wisdom Save vs becoming your slave for 24 hours or until you command another undead) which is slightly impressive. Hilariously, you still do Radiant damage with your Divine Smite, which seems like a major oversight.

[DrPraetor]

There's also tables for Framing Events, Complications, Twists and Side Quests. The complications are probably the best ones, while the "Twists" are almost all uniformly terrible.

Use this table instead:
http://dresdencodak.com/2009/05/11/42-e ... ct-twists/