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I don't mind the 5e modules being rehashes of the classics at all. I just wish that they'd make sure each story had a beginning, middle, and an end. Too many of the modules throw up their hands at the last act. Encouraging players to diverge is fine, but there really should be a core narrative that the DM can lean on from beginning to end.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:48
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Kaal posted:I don't mind the 5e modules being rehashes of the classics at all. I just wish that they'd make sure each story had a beginning, middle, and an end. Too many of the modules throw up their hands at the last act. Encouraging players to diverge is fine, but there really should be a core narrative that the DM can lean on from beginning to end. I feel like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too - combine story driven campaigns with the more free form, dungeon crawls that everybody remembers as absolute classics but have zero narrative power in the module itself.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:49
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The difference between:
Is massive. And, for 3 of those 4, you can in fact put some effort in and do a good job and make a product people will like. Unfortunately, WotC likes to do the last one a lot, and also does the first 3 with minimal effort most of the time, so here we are. Spoiler: TftYP was the last one and it was shiiiiiiit.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:54
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The thing I agree with Arivia about is that 5e doesn't teach you how to actually do the thing they want you to do, in modules. Chapter 5 of Avernus is loving embarrassing. As a newish GM who probably doesn't have all the experience needed to run these things and include other things as desired.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:54
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I just hope that when they repackage for 6e they're smart enough to include psionics on the front end, not the back, so they have the necessary framework for Spelljammer and Dark Sun revivals.
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Jul 7, 2020 21:56
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I just hope that when they repackage for 6e they're smart enough to include psionics on the front end, not the back, so they have the necessary framework for Spelljammer and Dark Sun revivals. Psionics are currently at no end of 5e
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Jul 7, 2020 22:00
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Lucas Archer posted:I feel like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too - combine story driven campaigns with the more free form, dungeon crawls that everybody remembers as absolute classics but have zero narrative power in the module itself. Oh this is definitely what they're doing. And they're cribbing liberally from their old campaign notes to fill pages with "background material" that only the DM will ever be interested in. And a lot of the best ideas seem to get spun off into separate Adventurers League sessions. In the end, DMs still have to do tons of work prepping for sessions since the material often has gaping holes. If 5e modules were recipes for a meal, they'd be the kind that has three pages of anecdotes and then leaves out most of the measurements. I want Hello Fresh.
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Jul 7, 2020 22:03
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Arivia posted:no. i mean the campaign has structural issues but you gotta understand, a vanishingly small about of people know jackshit about any of those npcs, places, or people, or events outside of what they learn while playing the campaign. no real number of people is playing dragon heist and going 'but where did the manshoon clone come from', they are going 'who is manshoon? oh he's a wizard w/ clones'
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Jul 7, 2020 23:03
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Farg posted:i mean the campaign has structural issues but you gotta understand, a vanishingly small about of people know jackshit about any of those npcs, places, or people, or events outside of what they learn while playing the campaign. no real number of people is playing dragon heist and going 'but where did the manshoon clone come from', they are going 'who is manshoon? oh he's a wizard w/ clones' Yeah, you have to remember that 5e (for better or worse) is a lot of player's first D&D edition, which is why I think this stuff is much more frustrating to people familiar with Forgotten Realms than people who aren't. I'm running Dragon Heist right now and certainly agree that it has plenty of flaws (mostly the lack of downtime after a certain point, and you know, not much heisting) but nothing that can't be addressed with some prep and thought from a DM. I'm also running it in a homebrew setting, so creativity was kinda needed from the start. I think the adventures are much "worse" for DMs than players, because you end up having to do a lot more work to iron out the plot holes or weird logic leaps, but so far none of the players in the two WoTC adventures I've run have complained. Arivia posted:Also something being fun doesn’t mean it’s good design. People have fun playing bad games all the time. Fun doesn’t excuse Dragon Heist being trash. I mean, the whole reason D&D exists is for the purpose of entertainment. You have to accept that if people are having fun with it, then to some degree it's successful.
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Jul 7, 2020 23:35
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Farg posted:i mean the campaign has structural issues but you gotta understand, a vanishingly small about of people know jackshit about any of those npcs, places, or people, or events outside of what they learn while playing the campaign. no real number of people is playing dragon heist and going 'but where did the manshoon clone come from', they are going 'who is manshoon? oh he's a wizard w/ clones' that doesn't make it any better. worldbuilding and continuity are essential for shared world settings, of which D&D and particularly the Forgotten Realms are one. Dragon Heist thoroughly, completely fails at a basic essential component of being a good D&D product in the roleplaying game line (that it fits in with the other parts of that line.) Bingo Bango posted:I mean, the whole reason D&D exists is for the purpose of entertainment. You have to accept that if people are having fun with it, then to some degree it's successful. No, that's incorrect. Again, people can make fun out of whatever, but that doesn't mean something is of good quality. Fun can be had with bad games or other bad products, and fun can often be created in spite of bad games; this is the power of gaming. But good games actually facilitate good experiences, instead of making them more difficult to reach. Dragon Heist doesn't facilitate poo poo, it's just trash you have to work in spite of to enjoy.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:00
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Arivia posted:that doesn't make it any better. worldbuilding and continuity are essential for shared world settings, of which D&D and particularly the Forgotten Realms are one. Dragon Heist thoroughly, completely fails at a basic essential component of being a good D&D product in the roleplaying game line (that it fits in with the other parts of that line.) What other 5e adventures does Dragon Heist contradict?
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Jul 8, 2020 00:07
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nelson posted:What other 5e adventures does Dragon Heist contradict? having there be another manshoon clone contradicts a bunch of other 5e media, including Death Masks and the Herald having mirt and laeral not talk to each other doesn't work for a variety of other things having to retcon the god-catcher from 4e really shows they give absolutely no shits like gently caress, they can't even keep their own products from THIS edition straight. not any other Realms continuity, just the stuff they have released since they started doing "D&D Next" it's so, so loving bad
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Jul 8, 2020 00:11
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I mentioned last time it came up but the really critical flaw from a player perspective with Dragon Heist as designed is the same problem that a lot of 5e adventures do, which is extreme railroading. The back half of the module is structured as a chase sequence where the part is always just on the cusp of getting the stone, but the module tells DMs to make sure that the players don't get the stone early through clever play, and if somehow they do, instruct the DM to contrive some way for them to lose the stone so the train gets back on the rails. The crazy justification for this in the module is that "the stone doesn't want to be owned by those who haven't proven themselves deserving" or some such bullshit, despite the fact that to manage to actually get the stone you'd hope that the players would have to be very smart to do so, and so surely are deserving. But of course, if the players do get the stone, well, they short circuit all those chase encounters and skip a huge chunk of the adventure, which is really bad. But the solution here would have been to write a more robust scenario, not tell the DM to invalidate the players' agency which is ludicrous. This is similar to the problem with Descent into Avernus, which is packed full at least in the early chapters (not finished reading it yet) with NPCs who either spoonfeed you a linear sequence of encounters by telling you exactly where to go for your next one, or NPCs who essentially say "perform this task or be executed". I appreciate it's not easy to write an adventure which is partially non-linear, or allow the players to set their own objectives, but that's exactly why these adventures should be worth paying for! Most novice DMs can muddle their way through a homebrew campaign where the adventure is practically a linear narrative of dungeons and set pieces, a hardcover published adventure should make a newer DM feel like they've been gifted a campaign from one of the world's best, with the notes and advice to make a good show of running it. If you're already an experienced DM, sure, you can work around all this. You can finesse things so that the players don't even realise they have no agency at all except the manner in which they kill the monsters. Or you can be just straight up with players that this is the sort of adventure they've signed up for and some will be perfectly fine with that. But geez, it misses what's really cool about tabletop RPGs over video games. You could completely restructure the adventure to be more open and expansive, but unless some other DM has already done that work for you it's a massive undertaking. The other flaw with Dragon Heist from the DMs end is that you don't get to use like, half the book. Owning a tavern is cool, but once you've actually opened the Tavern and chapter 3 begins, there's a very strong chance the adventure will be over within two or three in game days, so if your players enjoy that (mine spent half a session on job interviews for wait staff), you as the DM have to do a fair bit of work to not have that all immediately fall by the wayside once the doors open. There's a bunch of lairs in the back of the book that almost literally say "if your players end up here you hosed up and they're probably going to die" with pretty much zero guidance to running a raid, heist or infiltration of these lairs to recover the stone, which would be the main reason they'd have had to come here (because you, foolish DM, failed to ensure that each step in the encounter had it's predetermined conclusion regardless of what the players did). Also, each encounter comes in four flavours for the season, (and the order is jumbled to make four distinct chase sequences) ostensibly out of some sort of replayability for the module, but seriously, what percentage of DMs are going to run the module more than once? I'd wager a vanishingly small percentage, honestly, and you've got to wonder if that time could have been better spent. Dragon Heist was the best campaign I ever ran in D&D, but I had to do a lot of work in Roll20 to incorporate Justin Alexander's remix of the campaign, orders of magnitude more than I've ever done for another campaign. It was worth it, which speaks to the quality of the central core of the idea, but I'm eternally thankful I didn't just run it straight out of the book, as the adventure in that book was a very deeply flawed one.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:20
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Arivia posted:You did see the last page, right? Maybe the thing by the designer who worked on their new Icewind Dale adventure? The whole company is retrograde as gently caress, just this old white boys club. (They're having plenty of issues on the MtG side too, don't worry.) Burn it all down, and take the lovely edition that was horrible from the beginning and created by people covering for rapists with it. I hope you also never make a purchase from Amazon or really any corporation ever if you're this upset about WotC. Daily reminder:  On the talk of editions, I'm one of those weirdos that really loving fell in love with 4th edition D&D. Though, I feel like the flaws of 4th edition was that they had no idea what they were doing when they started and the 4e was cool despite WotC being terrible (also, there were too many status effects slowing down combat in 4e). I hope when they look toward 6e someday, they blend 5e and 4e some. I just mainly liked everyone having at-will and encounter powers far more than fighters swing swords and wizards use spell slots.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:22
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Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the most damning flaw of Waterdeep Dragon Heist is that there is no heist.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:25
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Mordiceius posted:I hope you also never make a purchase from Amazon or really any corporation ever if you're this upset about WotC. this is not and was never a reason to not critically engage with your own consumption on an ethical level. and good news! we have alternatives that are generally understood to be more ethical, even if they aren't completely ethically perfect! this isn't the good place, we're not going to go to hell for just playing indie RPGs instead of not playing RPGs at all.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:27
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Yeah, 5E is popular for reasons completely independent of WotC/Mearls' design choices. However, WotC doen't understand this for the most part and will continue to ride 5E into the ground until the last second The key to understanding 5e is that they weren't trying to make it good - they were trying to make it not bad. It's not trying to be a Michelin starred meal equivalent - it's trying to be the happy meal of RPGs with as little as possible that anyone objects to strongly that's not as core to D&D as possible. It does a surprisingly good job of being mediocre.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:28
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Yeah, as someone who doesn't give a gently caress about lore or retconning. Do whatever you think works best and makes the most sense for the story. I'm not particularly precious about lore or story for these things where so much of it is homebrewed and made up anyway. The main problems I tend to have are along withwhat Reveilled said, these books can't decide whether they want to be on railroads, or sandboxed. The Sandbox they open up they don't even remotely teach you how to try and run something like that as a GM, and the railroad sections don't teach you how to provide the motivation for your players if they don't want to jump on the railroad. They are just bad tools for a GM who's never been a GM before, as far as running and managing a game.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:28
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FWIW, I have zero investment in prior editions, the Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep, the NPCs, or the setting. And WDH was still incredibly lovely, both as a player and a GM. It was poorly written, didn't provide a cohesive narrative, was railroady, had an incredibly unfulfilling ending, was stuffed to the gills with setting fluff not intended for use in the main storyline, used absolutely awful monster choices, didn't allow for any sort of scaling, assumed a lot of facts not-in-evidence, and leaned hard on your players caring for specific story beats or it fell apart. Even largely knowing how to fix it, I'd still never inflict this willingly on anyone, much less suggest they pay money for it. There is no level on which WDH isn't a total failure of design and if you enjoyed it as a player, you should be very thankful to your DM for basically writing a whole new story out of the bones of what was provided.
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Jul 8, 2020 00:37
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Arivia posted:this is not and was never a reason to not critically engage with your own consumption on an ethical level. and good news! we have alternatives that are generally understood to be more ethical, even if they aren't completely ethically perfect! this isn't the good place, we're not going to go to hell for just playing indie RPGs instead of not playing RPGs at all. Yeah, and I don't plan to switch to Pathfinder because I never have and never will enjoy Pathfinder. At the same time, there is a larger cultural familiarity with D&D, so at the present I have zero plans to stop buying D&D-related products. That doesn't mean I won't be critical of them. But I mean, it's the same thing with people who still play World of Warcraft. Blizzard is a poo poo company that doesn't deserve anyone's money, but I'm not going to begrudge people that keep paying for it because they enjoy the guild community they have there.
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Jul 8, 2020 01:18
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The talk about how bad the pre-written adventures are has been kinda relevant to me immediately because about a month ago my party finished a heavily altered Curse of Strahd based off some of the suggestions I'd read and loved it, but now I'm about to start Descent into Avernus this week and oh my *god* this adventure kinda blows, I'm still reading through the book but so much of this is just "Go here or I'll kill you" or just being told "Hey the thing you're looking for is at this place." I feel like I gotta completely rewrite the entire intro to the campaign.
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Jul 8, 2020 01:43
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ArchRanger posted:The talk about how bad the pre-written adventures are has been kinda relevant to me immediately because about a month ago my party finished a heavily altered Curse of Strahd based off some of the suggestions I'd read and loved it, but now I'm about to start Descent into Avernus this week and oh my *god* this adventure kinda blows, I'm still reading through the book but so much of this is just "Go here or I'll kill you" or just being told "Hey the thing you're looking for is at this place." I feel like I gotta completely rewrite the entire intro to the campaign. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/44214/roleplaying-games/remixing-avernus
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Jul 8, 2020 01:49
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Mordiceius posted:Yeah, and I don't plan to switch to Pathfinder because I never have and never will enjoy Pathfinder. At the same time, there is a larger cultural familiarity with D&D, so at the present I have zero plans to stop buying D&D-related products. That doesn't mean I won't be critical of them. They don't care if you're critical of them, only that you keep spending money.
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Jul 8, 2020 01:49
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Toshimo posted:Spoiler: TftYP was the last one and it was shiiiiiiit. I'm running a TftYP campaign for two groups during lockdown, and I've played a campaign of it before. Sunless Citadel is the only good adventure in the book. DM'ing now, I come to realise how much my previous DM heavily homebrewed Forge of Fury, Hidden Shrine, and White Plume. He straight said he didn't want to do Dead in Thay and we never went any further  I'm thinking of using Hidden Shrine as an excuse to send my groups to Chult to do the non-tomb parts of ToA. Blooming Brilliant fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 02:04
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Yeah, I'm trying to work my way through the book and this at the same pace, honestly the advice to start in Elturel alone is worth tons.
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Jul 8, 2020 02:11
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Arivia posted:having there be another manshoon clone contradicts a bunch of other 5e media, including Death Masks and the Herald Yeah but me and no one I play with know what the gently caress those things are or who those people are before the adventurer so it wasn't a problem
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Jul 8, 2020 03:19
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Farg posted:Yeah but me and no one I play with know what the gently caress those things are or who those people are before the adventurer so it wasn't a problem your ignorance doesn't make it a good adventure, it just means you weren't equipped to know why it's bad.
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Jul 8, 2020 03:28
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Arivia posted:your ignorance doesn't make it a good adventure, it just means you weren't equipped to know why it's bad. You realize this game is just make-believe with dice right?
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Jul 8, 2020 03:41
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nelson posted:You realize this game is just make-believe with dice right? how much time and money do we collectively invest in it? it's worth caring about the things we do. it's worth doing them right.
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Jul 8, 2020 03:45
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Arivia posted:your ignorance doesn't make it a good adventure, it just means you weren't equipped to know why it's bad. no for me its more like you saying that they didn't provide recipes for any of the meals at the tavern in the adventure. i just dont care about it, its a non factor, and is a non factor for the vast majority.
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Jul 8, 2020 03:56
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nelson posted:You realize this game is just make-believe with dice right? I'd say there are enough people who care deeply about the lore and settings of the industry leading TTRPG that it'd be nice if the current team put any effort into making their entries make sense. I personally don't interface with that side of the game and you don't have to to play it, but ignoring it entirely is deeply misguided. Just because you don't care about an aspect of the game doesn't mean it's not important. Heck, weren't we just talking ITT recently about how valuable the D&D IP is? There are plenty of good RPGs that provide tight rules for "make-believe with dice" that don't depend on established settings, but this ain't one of them.
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Jul 8, 2020 04:03
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Farg posted:no for me its more like you saying that they didn't provide recipes for any of the meals at the tavern in the adventure. i just dont care about it, its a non factor, and is a non factor for the vast majority. citation needed or this is just an appeal to the majority
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Jul 8, 2020 04:09
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Admiral Joeslop posted:They don't care if you're critical of them, only that you keep spending money. Okay. And?
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Jul 8, 2020 04:09
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Farg posted:no for me its more like you saying that they didn't provide recipes for any of the meals at the tavern in the adventure. i just dont care about it, its a non factor, and is a non factor for the vast majority. i think that saying "because i dont care about this, nobody does" is the wrong takeaway. if someone has a criticism of a module that does not apply to your group, that does not make the criticism invalid. personally i do not really care much about forgotten realms lore but since the setting is in the forgotten realms, to have glaring inconsistencies is a legitimate flaw
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Jul 8, 2020 04:11
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So does anyone have favorite campaigns they really like? Official or otherwise? I run so much AL that I guess I don't know much about most of the books at all, except GSM which as a player I can say sucks poo poo when run as an AL hardcover
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Jul 8, 2020 04:33
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pog boyfriend posted:i think that saying "because i dont care about this, nobody does" is the wrong takeaway. if someone has a criticism of a module that does not apply to your group, that does not make the criticism invalid. personally i do not really care much about forgotten realms lore but since the setting is in the forgotten realms, to have glaring inconsistencies is a legitimate flaw bingo. if you don't give a poo poo about FR and Waterdeep is just names for you that's fine. If you ran Sharn Dragon Heist or Homebrew Metropolis Dragon Heist that's also totally fine, and more power to you. But that doesn't mean that criticizing the actual product for being badly written and misrepresenting the setting that it is part of is illegitimate.
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Jul 8, 2020 04:37
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Mordiceius posted:Okay. And? Do you not understand that saying you'll be critical of a company while still giving them money, a company that only cares about you giving them money, is meaningless? If you want to support the kind of company that WotC is, don't pretend you're taking some kind of stand by "being critical."
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Jul 8, 2020 04:48
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Syrinxx posted:So does anyone have favorite campaigns they really like? Official or otherwise? I run so much AL that I guess I don't know much about most of the books at all, except GSM which as a player I can say sucks poo poo when run as an AL hardcover Of the official hardcovers, the only one I'd actively recommend is SKT. SKT good.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:02
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So on the subject of alternate d20 systems: one criticism I often hear about Pathfinder 1e is that there's a much larger difference in power between an optimized character and a non-optimized character than there is in D&D 5e. Is that still the case in Pathfinder 2e? One of the things I enjoy about D&D 5e is that the power gamers at my table don't eclipse the more casual / role-play-focused players.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:10
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Do you not understand that saying you'll be critical of a company while still giving them money, a company that only cares about you giving them money, is meaningless? If you want to support the kind of company that WotC is, don't pretend you're taking some kind of stand by "being critical." I never said I was taking some valiant stand. I just think it's hilarious that some people will vilify buying a D&D module and yet they probably still order from Amazon.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:11
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