The Gaming Den

So, WotC finally pulled the trigger and is putting out an actual D&D setting book for a Magic the Gathering plane. Of course, that plane is Ravnica, as that's perhaps one of the most popular MtG settings.

I'm conflicted. This actually makes me want to play some 5e. Except this is probably going to be mostly a fluff book, and after the Planescape articles (and the first sentence of the spiel being inaccurate), I don't have a huge amount of faith in this product. But I'm intrigued.

What they need is to get the actual MtG design team on board to make the setting and set out "Here is what the rules need to reflect, here is what a game should look like" rather than just taking a setting, plonking it down and saying "Why not play here?" And then the next step would be getting the MtG rules team to make the RPG. Ideally from the ground up.

I believe the MTG design team is already quite busy designing MTG.

Anyway this won't just be a MTG campaign setting book for 5e, it will be the first actual campaign setting book for 5e. I'm feeling optimistic today so here's hoping that like the previous editions campaign settings it has a nice amount of crunch to go along the fluff.

What would a D&D game designed by the MtG team look like, I wonder? Better than what Mearls produces, sure, but I don't know if the skills to design a competitive game with flavor text to set an atmosphere will carry over to a cooperative game where setting books are expected to dedicate 10,000+ words to describing a setting in enough detail that players can meaningfully interact with it, with rules support for the important bits.

@Koumei:
Well, that actually speaks to another point in favor of using Ravnica for this, as it is one of very few planes to actually have two full three-set blocks for it already (the others, that come to mind at least, are Dominaria, Zendikar, and, arguably, Innistrad--they switched to two set blocks before the second Innistrad block). So the D&D team has a lot of material already to work with, both in the stuff we the public have seen, and probably a bunch of internal documents they were, hopefully, handed.

@Cham
I think the MtG team could do very well. They have been beaten into shape by 25 years of doing what they do, and they have, like, three fucking internal teams- design, development, and creative. The MtG team is very, very good at what they do, and I think they could handle a cooperative tabletop rpg just fine.

They promoted some D&D people into Magic development. All the D&D web enhancements are written by James Wyatt, who is an old D&D hack but is technically part of the MtG story team these days. Ravnica is getting a book this fall because of cross marketing - the next set is going to be set in Ravnica again. There are two more sets in 2019 that are also set in Ravnica. So they've stopped doing "blocks" but they are setting three sets in a row in the same plane, which sounds a whole lot like a return to 3 set blocks. Except of course, they are all stand alone big sets.

-Username17

The change to Stand Alone sets is basically a more marketable version of "we're just gonna do what the fuck we want." And really... having played off and on since Unlimited or Revised, and seen three set blocks, two set blocks, core sets, one offs, supplementals... Ok. Like, I wish we'd spent more time in Dominaria, but Ravnica is cool and I'm excited to potentially get a chance to do some of the cool more community-building stuff they roll out for Ravnica sets.

The big thing you get from the magic community is the willingness to analyze rules and numbers and to listen to people who are capable of doing that. WotC - from what I've heard - promotes actual tournament winners to designers, whereas Mike Mearls pretty much just throws his hands up and screams that rules are hard.

Sometimes I wonder, what the fuck do they do in that office all day?

With some good luck, they'll get an influx of MtG players who want rules that work from the system, and actually have to make D&D not shitty.

Much more likely, it'll be as popular as the WoW supplement for D&D.

WotC has some actual award-winning writers on tap for MtG. So if they actually wrote parts of the book, I'd buy it.

Of course, they probably have nothing to do with it. Sigh.

I took a look at the product page on WotC and Amazon, and they're just crediting it as "The Wizards RPG Team." Which...

Wow. Maybe I'm just cynical, but that seems like the big wigs at WotC realized that Mearls et al. had like 0 credibility and they're trying to minimize the effect anyone's name will have on the product.

If you really want to play Magic in d&d, just buy one of the magic World Books. All the fluff and just as much of 5E's non-rules.

They put "Wizards RPG Team" on a lot of their submissions to Amazon. My understanding is that they do it so that people on Amazon can click on the "author" and get all the books from the edition. I mean, obviously it means the company cares about the "brand" more than it cares about any of its writers and designers, but that's hardly news.

The 5e team has done a lot of weird shift with their Amazon profile. Like, I can't think of a reason for Volo's Guide to Monsters to have over 300 five star reviews unless that's part of a marketing strategy. And then there was that thing at the start of the edition where they gave big discounts for buying on Amazon and then made big press releases about how well it was selling on Amazon.

-Username17

Iduno wrote:With some good luck, they'll get an influx of MtG players who want rules that work from the system, and actually have to make D&D not shitty.

Much more likely, it'll be as popular as the WoW supplement for D&D.

WoW was garbage because Blizzard literally becomes less creative as they iterate a product, preferring the cliches that inspire a Blizzard concept over the concept itself.

For example, having engaged with WCI through III, the first thing I thought about at WoW game was “I want to play a dryad.” The second thing was “I want to play a demon hunter.” The game didn’t let you do either. Indeed, it attacked its own world background to force the characters to fit into the d20 mold, rather than modifying d20 for its purposes: the abilities, and therefore the characters, in the WC universe aren’t found in WoW d20. . . which means that no consumer needed to buy the book since it did nothing more than a player could do, trivially, on his or her own. (E.g., make a d20 character using the Core Rules and declare her from Azeroth.)

I'm already not playing 5E as there's no reason for me to shift over to it but I'd be interested in maybe buying the book just for the campaign setting tidbits. I only heavily played MAGIC when Ravnica was the theme and I haven't played much (or at all in some cases) in any of the sets since my first time playing. My memory tells me that I thought the setting was pretty cool at the time and I know at least two people who played MAGIC way more than I did. If this move by WotC does anything it might make me spend money on 5E for the first time 'just' because of MAGIC.

MGuy wrote:If this move by WotC does anything it might make me spend money on 5E for the first time 'just' because of MAGIC.

I bet this applies to a lot of people. Also, there are D&D players and MCs who aren't aware of the Planeshift PDFs and so they see this as a first time of the two brands meeting in public.

And I have to admit that I'm curious as to if and how WotC tried to adapt MtG's magic color wheel to D&D spellcasting. It's probably not a great idea to even try because even a low-effort approach like spell lists sortet by color doesn't actually make the game play different (and believing that WotC does anything other than a low-effort approach in this regard is almost delusional).

I also just realize that this is the second official D&D mashup that some part of the fan culture has been dreaming of for decades, with Adventures in Middle-earth being the first one. It sure is a weird time to be a D&D player...

They're not gonna adapt the color wheel, the game will explode. 5e barely handles multiclassing.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:They're not gonna adapt the color wheel, the game will explode. 5e barely handles multiclassing.

No summoning == No green (or black, or blue, or red... is there any color without creatures?)

The implementation is just going to be that you declare yourself to be some color and that possibly gives you a bullshit bonus comparable to a background and also allows you to select some feats that you don't care about because 5e characters get hardly any feats.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The implementation is just going to be that you declare yourself to be some color and that possibly gives you a bullshit bonus comparable to a background and also allows you to select some feats that you don't care about because 5e characters get hardly any feats.

-Username17

So pretty much you're gonna be the 1-mana summon of some actual Planeswalker (I wouldn't be surprised if that was the DM)... sounds par for the course.

Dogbert wrote:So pretty much you're gonna be the 1-mana summon of some actual Planeswalker (I wouldn't be surprised if that was the DM)... sounds par for the course.

Well, yeah. A first level character is a 1 mana summons of an actual planeswalker. The issue I have is that 5e doesn't really go up high enough that being a planeswalker yourself would ever be a real option. The thing is starting as a 1 mana summons and then leveling up into a Planeswalker is literally canon in Magic.



But as you say, the game crumbles under the weight of conjuring of any sort. The number one "exploit" of the edition is still just casting animate dead, and that makes a 2 mana creature in MtG.



If you could actually summon angels or pelakka wurms or something, the entire game would implode. 5e is just a really fragile system, and the unambitious math base is a big reason why.

-Username17

A friend of mine apparently busted a GM today because the GM wanted to make an encounter really hard and he broke it because slowly, over many levels, he amassed 75 Skeletons all with bows, and trivialized the whole thing when he actually put them to use. All I had to do was tell him 'make a necromancer' once, offhandedly half a year ago and now he personally is strong enough to be a big player in the 'shared world' DnD thing he is playing in over Discord. I don't see this MAGIC clash thing being so much about 'rules' as 'rulings'.

I haven't seen any MAGIC/DnD hybrid thing myself before and I'm really only interested in reading the setting details for Ravnica as I do not know anything about the other settings outside the excited ramblings of some of my MAGIC fan friends. They say they like Innistrad too but all I know about that is something something Vampires.

FrankTrollman wrote:5e is just a really fragile system, and the unambitious math base is a big reason why.

-Username17

"the unambitious math base is a big reason why."
What do you mean by this comment? You mean the slow number scaling? Don't lots of RPGs have relatively low numbers scaling? Like, World of Darkness style math or FFG Star Wars math has a relatively small max power level compared to where you'll start, no?

The problem with 5e's Math IMO is that the scaling by level is so small, it doesn't allow room for much math at all.

It's possible to have a system where characters stay on the RNG even if all the numbers are on a +1 (or greater) per level treadmill, as long as the characters other modifiers don't throw it off the RNG vs an opponent of similar level.
For instance, if most modifiers for characters landed with the Level + 1 to Level + 10 Range, an even character could have a range of 0 to 100% chance of success vs and opposing DC on the same scale.

How much of this "bonus vs randomizer ratio" issue would be solved by replacing the d20 with (3d6+2df) or with (1d10+5)?