Tomes in 5E?

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The Adventurer's Almanac
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Re: Races of War

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

This may be a bit off-topic, but what does everyone think the odds are of 5e eventually getting a cool, ambitious project like this one for it?
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Re: Races of War

Post by Omegonthesane »

It seems almost impossible to me that there could ever be 5e Tomes or any fan project of comparable ambition and purpose. Fundamentally it needed a lot of recognition of deep issues with 3rd edition D&D, and a belief that the way to solve these was to change the rules rather than to have the DM fix it at runtime.
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Tomes in 5E?

Post by Kaelik »

Hard to imagine why anyone would write like 30 times the amount of rules of all of 5e to address 5e problems.

At that point you are deep into the already borderline "why not just make your own game" position.
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Re: Races of War

Post by WalkTheDin0saur »

Step 1 : Come up with a unified theory of how monsters work at X level, with clear numeric targets and expectations for what kinds of abilities players can respond to.

Step 2 : Rewrite the entire Monster Manual.

Step 3 : Yeah fuck this.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Prak »

I think there are things that could be improved in 5e, along the lines that Tome intended to improve 3.X stuff, but I think trying to do a "Tome, but for 5e" is badly missing the point of 5e. The fundamental issue with 5e is not so much bad rules, as it is a fundamentally different philosophy about the game and rules. My understanding is that, more so than 3.X, the only reason that "people like us" play 5e is that it is the game on offer if we want to play D&D. I've basically gotten to the "this is fine" level of accepting 5e. It's not what I would like to play, but I can mostly make it do what I want, and I haven't really run into a lot of rules I'd specifically change (I mean, the fact that a pactblade warlock is a better soulknife than a soulknife rogue is pretty damning, but... ok, so I play a pactblade warlock to get my soulknife on, whatever).

In general, there are two kinds of people who play 5e, those like us, who play because it's what we can get, and people who genuinely like the philosophy behind it. And that means that there's no real point to a 5e Tome. Because it only has a use if the DM wants to use it, and if the DM wants a more mechanically complex and robust system then... they could run 3.x, with or without tome.

However... I could see a point to some more modular changes. I'm not aware of a particularly robust system of figuring out what magic items a PC should have or have access to, and I think there could be something useful there, and it could be uploaded to D&D Beyond or DM's Guild or whatever and get some widespread usage, and maybe be looked at by WotC when they inevitably look to do 6e. But whether that's something anyone wants to do... is another question entirely.
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Re: Races of War

Post by WalkTheDin0saur »

I think a 5e rewrite that actually got finished would come out as a whole new D&D clone anyway. Username17 said he stopped working on the Tomes because it was turning into a whole new game and the massive pile of work that entailed, right? And that's 3e which is a lot more inheritance based and you can make high level changes and apply the consequences downstream.

I know this will come as a shock to everyone and I'm sure this is a totally unique experience on this board, but my hard drive is full of text documents detailing a D&D clone I'm never going to finish. And it is trying to be more approachable and less charop focused than 3e so maybe 5e people would like it? I don't know, I like to think so. The realistic answer is that it would take a shitload of time to get it to a point where I'd want to post it and then if I was really really lucky maybe a few dozen people would read it. It made sense to work on when I'd just gotten out of an abusive relationship and was collecting unemployment in my parents' guest room and wanted to think about, like, anything except my real life. It's a lot harder to justify now that I could be spending my computer time actually making money and my not-computer time at the beach.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Stubbazubba »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 10:38 pm
This may be a bit off-topic, but what does everyone think the odds are of 5e eventually getting a cool, ambitious project like this one for it?
I think there are already things that approach it, like Giffyglyph's Darker Dungeons. Obviously, it's not on the level of the Tomes, and it's not the same approach or philosophy as to why it's needed, but overhauling 5e from the top down is a thing that people do and there appears to be some appetite for, which makes some sense since 5e's design philosophy is "everything is half-baked, we won't focus on doing any one thing."

Another project currently in progress is Level Up 5e, which promises crunchier rules and more rigor than standard 5e while keeping things simple. Yep, sounds contradictory to me, too, and I haven't followed it enough to really know what kind of nonsense is coming out there, but people have had this idea to overhaul 5e and do get a small following out of it.
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Re: Races of War

Post by WiserOdin032402 »

Kaelik wrote:
Fri Jun 18, 2021 12:44 am
Hard to imagine why anyone would write like 30 times the amount of rules of all of 5e to address 5e problems.

At that point you are deep into the already borderline "why not just make your own game" position.
I've watched this happen no less than three times now with various independent developers, usually in the name of 'realism' or 'making the game more realistic'. They start off with the realism, move to the weapon and class rebalancing, start realizing how bad 5e is, then burn out super hard and go play something like Blades in the Dark or Dungeon World because their group actually never wanted D&D in the first place and really wanted one of those two games.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Dogbert »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 10:38 pm
This may be a bit off-topic, but what does everyone think the odds are of 5e eventually getting a cool, ambitious project like this one for it?
You can write a flavor/distro of 3.X without rewriting the whole of 3.X.

You can't even so much as rewrite 5E because there's nothing to rewrite in there. "Fixing" 5E would require to write the whole damn thing in the first place. Whoever feels like doing Mearls' work for free is welcome to it, but I'm certaintly not it.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Chamomile »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Thu Jun 17, 2021 10:38 pm
This may be a bit off-topic, but what does everyone think the odds are of 5e eventually getting a cool, ambitious project like this one for it?
One hundred percent (you have to scroll down past Dark Lord to reach it). With the added benefit that I am unlikely to stop partway through so long as I continue making like $2,000/month off of them. Of course, the other end of the Kickstarter economy is that, with PF2 having split the 3.X fanbase more ways than can possibly be salvaged by an operation of my size, I have to use 5e as a foundation and there's limitations to how far I can break away from vanilla 5e before I lose my audience.

The market is perfectly hungry for awesome player options, so I've got plenty of those, and for new monsters, including boss-fight overhauls for several big ones, so I've got a smattering of those as well, but dislikes heavy math overhauls. I did make a math overhaul for 5e, but even this fairly limited overhaul has met with indifference at best. Granted, I always anticipated it wouldn't do well and thus it did not receive a whole lot of marketing polish (its cover is perfunctory, its description is short, and its total length is five pages with a huge density of illustrations), so that could potentially be the culprit, but customer response on my books always falls into two categories: People who say "I love [theme]!" and Krusk. So if I tried to push a math-overhaul book that did things like make proficiency bonus scale faster so that there was a noticeable difference in skill bonuses between level 5 and level 10, I'm pretty sure my audience would be Krusk.
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Re: Races of War

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Chamomile wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 4:59 pm
One hundred percent (you have to scroll down past Dark Lord to reach it). With the added benefit that I am unlikely to stop partway through so long as I continue making like $2,000/month off of them.
I'm gonna need to bring this thread to a screeching halt for a moment while I consider my life decisions real quick. Are you telling me you're getting paid about what I am just to write TTRPG stuff? Is this a side gig or do you sit around all day thinking and writing about pretend elf games?
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Re: Races of War

Post by Foxwarrior »

WalkTheDin0saur wrote:
Fri Jun 18, 2021 5:07 pm
I know this will come as a shock to everyone and I'm sure this is a totally unique experience on this board, but my hard drive is full of text documents detailing a D&D clone I'm never going to finish.

...

The realistic answer is that it would take a shitload of time to get it to a point where I'd want to post it and then if I was really really lucky maybe a few dozen people would read it.
Not me. Mine's done. Only at most a few dozen people read it though. But hey, getting to play a game you've made yourself is its own reward, at least.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Chamomile »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 6:03 pm
Chamomile wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 4:59 pm
One hundred percent (you have to scroll down past Dark Lord to reach it). With the added benefit that I am unlikely to stop partway through so long as I continue making like $2,000/month off of them.
I'm gonna need to bring this thread to a screeching halt for a moment while I consider my life decisions real quick. Are you telling me you're getting paid about what I am just to write TTRPG stuff? Is this a side gig or do you sit around all day thinking and writing about pretend elf games?
It was a side gig up until covid-19. I went fulltime during the shutdown and it remains unclear whether or not I'm going to be able to maintain this long term. Chamomile's Guide to Everything is doing very well on Kickstarter and keeps growing with each release, but it's only got a roadmap out to early 2022 and the more I think about it, the more confident I am that the follow-up can't just be another series of twelve expansion books, or at least not ones written by me. 5e doesn't have nearly enough expansion content, but that doesn't mean there's infinite room to produce more.

Also, I got here by working a side gig for less than or barely minimum wage for five years (I made nothing at all for the first year), which would almost certainly have been impossible if I didn't have parents willing to let me live out of my childhood bedroom for months at a time. So long as the side gig made enough money to cover groceries, I could tell my day job to get fucked any time they made unreasonable demands on my time and spend as long as needed finding a new one with reasonable enough hours that I could run my professional GMing business (an important foundation to my success on Kickstarter) reliably in the evenings. In theory, this isn't necessary to doing what I do, but in practice, you have to get luck enough that a shitty job will never destroy your ability to keep your side gig's momentum running strong enough to turn into a full-time thing, and you have to be that lucky for 3-5 years straight.

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Re: Races of War

Post by Josh_Kablack »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 6:03 pm
Chamomile wrote:
Sat Jun 19, 2021 4:59 pm
One hundred percent (you have to scroll down past Dark Lord to reach it). With the added benefit that I am unlikely to stop partway through so long as I continue making like $2,000/month off of them.
I'm gonna need to bring this thread to a screeching halt for a moment while I consider my life decisions real quick. Are you telling me you're getting paid about what I am just to write TTRPG stuff? Is this a side gig or do you sit around all day thinking and writing about pretend elf games?
$2,000 a month is a living, but not a great living -- that's roughly equivalent to $12 per hour. But if that's self-employment income in the US, you take a bigger tax hit as you are responsible for both sides of FICA taxes. So really it works out to a bit less than $12/hour. And at least in my area, Target and Starbucks are currently hiring with a starting wage of $15/hour. And note Cham's above reply that it took him years of side hustling to build his business to the point where he brought in that much. If you are financially motivated, that's not a great life plan. You can work hard, get lucky, spend years building your brand and you get to make a bit less than starting service sector cashiers in a good labor market.
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Re: Tomes in 5E?

Post by Kaelik »

It is true that 2k a month is nothing special, but there are certainly enough people living absolutely horrible lives working themselves to death for less or barely more that they would be jealous.

But yes, Cham's explanation that it involved many years of not making that while working to build and that it might not be sustainable is of course the problem.
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Re: Tomes in 5E?

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

What? You mean there's not money in the solo RPG writing business?!
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Re: Races of War

Post by Bigdy McKen »

Stubbazubba wrote:
Fri Jun 18, 2021 6:39 pm

Another project currently in progress is Level Up 5e, which promises crunchier rules and more rigor than standard 5e while keeping things simple. Yep, sounds contradictory to me, too, and I haven't followed it enough to really know what kind of nonsense is coming out there, but people have had this idea to overhaul 5e and do get a small following out of it.
I’ve taken a look see at the preview materials for Level Up. Other than a few subsystems for the DM to tack on, it’s mostly player facing stuff: classes rewritten to have more decision points during character progression. There aren’t any math fixes or changes to the base system.

So any DMs looking for a version of 5E with a level of completeness approaching that of 3E will not find it here.
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Re: Races of War

Post by Pedantic »

Bigdy McKen wrote:
Mon Jun 28, 2021 6:07 pm
I’ve taken a look see at the preview materials for Level Up. Other than a few subsystems for the DM to tack on, it’s mostly player facing stuff: classes rewritten to have more decision points during character progression. There aren’t any math fixes or changes to the base system.

So any DMs looking for a version of 5E with a level of completeness approaching that of 3E will not find it here.
While certainly not up to that standard, they are doing a pretty ambitious rewrite of monsters, which has the potential to at least make combat somewhat less boring.
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