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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 i like ghosts of saltmarsh and tomb of annihilation, and sort of curse of strahd but i change so much that i dont really know. mostly i just run everything homebrew and take a few things i like from the books, and ghosts of saltmarsh is extremely good for that so its my favourite E: i also sort of like mad mage but it isnt exactly a good mega dungeon so i hacked it a lot when i ran it too, but as a framework it was nice and if you want to do more prep and your party is content with a mega dungeon campaign go for it pog boyfriend fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 05:12
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VikingofRock posted: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. relative power across characters of different levels of optimization is a lot closer in PF2 than it is/was in PF1, particularly as a product of the various options one can choose is somewhat more limited and focused, so there's less ways you can go wrong
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Jul 8, 2020 05:18
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VikingofRock posted: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. Pathfinder 2e's balance is much, much tighter from levels 1 to 20. It was one of the big things they worked on when they overhauled all the math, and it works. The only thing I'd be wary of is I'd recommend not playing an alchemist right right now until the APG comes out, because they're a bit underpowered/incomplete due to kind of being disassembled during the last half of playtesting.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:19
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Luckily the APG's out at the end of the month so fingers crossed they finally get some good item support
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Jul 8, 2020 05:31
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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 I'm running a group through parts of Ghosts of Saltmarsh (really just the three linked adventures) and we've been having fun. It's definitely flawed though, and really doesn't do enough with the "seafaring DnD" concept- the players got a boat pretty early on but there doesn't feel like there's a lot to "do" with it in the adventures. Sure they could just sail around while I roll random encounters, but that doesn't build a narrative the way I want to. I've been using the Sly Flourish modifications to give the individual chapters a little bit more focus and they've worked really well. (I guess this doesn't sound like an endorsement of the book but I like a lot of parts of it, and the town is fun to play around with.) e: pog boyfriend posted:i like ghosts of saltmarsh and tomb of annihilation, and sort of curse of strahd but i change so much that i dont really know. mostly i just run everything homebrew and take a few things i like from the books, and ghosts of saltmarsh is extremely good for that so its my favourite Said it better than I did. Lazy like a Fox fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 05:40
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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 Waterdeep: Dragon Heist There may be some flaws but it is a lot of fun.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:47
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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 I've been running Strahd and if the rona ever clears up I will hopefully actually finish it! I have a big ole boner for vampire poo poo so the whole aesthetic of the book just vibes with me. It's kind of hard to run because it's relatively sandboxy and reads more like a setting guide than an adventure but between my own brain and the CoS subreddit I've been able to make something where my group has overall had a lot of fun. I'm still really worried about sticking the landing but we'll see what happens when we get there.
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Jul 8, 2020 05:55
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Kaal posted: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. For real. I’m running my group through Avernus, and the last chapter is literally 8 pages long. It is just “here is about eight ways the endgame could happen—just figure it out. Lol” It is more of a splat book than an adventure and it makes a whole lot of assumptions about player motivation that really don’t pan out. I can’t tell if Wizards needs more editors, or just better ones. There are thirty pages on Baldur’s Gate, which involves maybe 20% of the story and was pretty transparently just added to tie into the video game. Edit: the module can’t even decide on the initial villain’s title. In some places he is referred to as High Overseer and in others it is High Observer.
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Jul 8, 2020 06:17
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Speaking of modules that do everything right - The 5e conversation for Zeitgeist is almost complete. I've been building the adventure in Foundry and it is still just loving incredible how well made it is.
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Jul 8, 2020 07:26
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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 Storm King's Thunder seems to be the best put together official campaign I've tried yet, it had a pretty decent amount of choice and good hooks to keep the party invested, and I never noticed the DM having to flounder around to cover up crappy parts of the material. Others I've tried seem to have some significant problems: Phandelver seems extraordinarily brutal and unforgiving in the beginning, which is a baffling choice since its often recommended as a starter adventure. Strahd seems to be extremely on rails and the Vistani are really uncomfortable. Tomb of Annihilation is just a huge slog of a hex crawl, with many hexes featuring nothing of note or just filled with encounters upon encounters which is a good way to get sick of 5e combat really fast. And I only did two adventures of Yawning Portal, but I didn't really understand what really connected them to each other, and they were both pretty straight forward without much to really make them memorable. We did end up making peace between kobolds and goblin kind, but I have no idea if that's a thing you're supposed to be able to do in the adventure or if that was our DM just letting us do what we wanted and going off the rails. Finally, I'm currently playing in a Dragonheist game, and our DM is putting forth a tremendous effort to make it entertaining. I was surprised to learn after a few sessions that basically everything good they were homebrewing, everything in the actual text seems to be extremely bare bones judged on how much (extremely cool) filler they'd have to put in. She's sped up the bar ownership thing so every where we go we're looting choice furniture and talking to townsfolk to invite them to work for our tavern so we're basically playing Waterdeep: Animal Crossing Heist, which draws everyone into the adventure kind of on its own.
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Jul 8, 2020 08:28
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Toshimo posted:Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the most damning flaw of Waterdeep Dragon Heist is that there is no heist. How does that even work?
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Jul 8, 2020 12:08
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Strom Cuzewon posted:How does that even work? It's nuts isn't it. You hear that and think, "surely that must be wrong", but no, as written in the module, there is literally no heist. The only sense in which there is a heist is in the following two senses which are extreme stretches: 1) The money which is the subject of the adventure is a treasure in an underground vault, moved there from Waterdeep's treasury by Dagult Neverember while he was Open Lord. Does embezzlement count as a "heist"? Mmmmayyyyb--no. No it doesn't. 2) The villains of the story are attempting to gain access to the vault to steal the money. They steal a stone which will tell them how to open the vault and their plan is to just walk into the vault and take the money. Does their plan to follow a treasure map to a buried treasure count as a "heist"? Mmmmayyyyb--no. No it doesn't. Since the general expectation is that the PCs will end up working for the government of Waterdeep either directly or through an associated faction, the players' role is to recover the money for the city. Now you might think "aha, so if the players steal the money instead, that is a heist!" But no. The module takes great pains to instruct the DM that they should absolutely, positively make sure the PCs do not get away with doing this. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 12:52
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Reveilled posted:It's nuts isn't it. You hear that and think, "surely that must be wrong", but no, as written in the module, there is literally no heist. The only sense in which there is a heist is in the following two senses which are extreme stretches: Not only that, but there's not really a dragon in any meaningful way. Aurinax shows up at the very end, but in the form of an old dwarf. The only time the party is going to see a dragon is if they attack him (ensuring a party wipe) or lure the final enemies through the entire dungeon to face him. It's an odd decision from a writer's perspective. The book enjoys pointing out that Waterdeep gold pieces are called "dragons", but it would be better if it was a double entendre rather than a total bait and switch. The DM is basically forced to rewrite the ending, or else never live up to the title of the adventure. I enjoyed running Waterdeep Dragon Heist, but some assembly is definitely required. Kaal fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 13:20
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Kaal posted:Not only that, but there's not really a dragon in any meaningful way. Aurinax shows up at the very end, but in the form of an old dwarf. The only time the party is going to see a dragon is if they attack him (ensuring a party wipe) or lure the final enemies through the entire dungeon to face him. It's an odd decision from a writer's perspective. The book enjoys pointing out that Waterdeep gold pieces are called "dragons", but it would be better if it was a double entendre rather than a total bait and switch. The DM is basically forced to rewrite the ending, or else never live up to the title of the adventure. Yep, I cut that character from the adventure entirely. I switched things up so that an artifact called the Tear of Mephistopheles had been left to guard the vault, containing a sliver of the soul of the former Lord of the Eighth (he's dead in my FR), so the players had to fight a giant dragon made of ice at the adventure's conclusion. Also, I think my favourite silly wrinkle in the plot is that if you're playing the version which has Jarlaxle as the villain, the players need to get the gold and give it back to Waterdeep in order to stop his nefarious plan of...giving the gold back to Waterdeep. Oh and kicking Neverember (the guy who embezzled the money in the first place!) out of the Lord's Alliance and letting Luskan join. How utterly base and immoral. The adventure seems to be aware that the players who discover Jarlaxle's intent might conclude that city-state politics are not worth trying to stop him, or even that Jarlaxle's actually the good guy here, so it tries to paper over that crack by having him make the players an offer which is insultingly low to try to force them back into conflict.
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Jul 8, 2020 13:37
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What if the real heist was the friends we made along the way?  Edit: had more to this but am distracted by my 5-year-old! Quiet Feet fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Jul 8, 2020 |
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Jul 8, 2020 13:41
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Honestly the absolute worst crime though is that there's no instruction to the DM to do a Sean Connery impression when RPing Jarlaxle. I can't believe I missed that opportunity until it was too late.
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Jul 8, 2020 13:47
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Reveilled posted:Honestly the absolute worst crime though is that there's no instruction to the DM to do a Sean Connery impression when RPing Jarlaxle. I can't believe I missed that opportunity until it was too late. It's setting canon in my regular group that all Sun Dwarves speak like Sean Connery.
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Jul 8, 2020 13:50
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Reveilled posted:Honestly the absolute worst crime though is that there's no instruction to the DM to do a Sean Connery impression when RPing Jarlaxle. I can't believe I missed that opportunity until it was too late. i do remember a good  moment when we realized what Scarlet Marpenoth meant
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Jul 8, 2020 14:08
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Well, lost track of where my train of thought was going but I actually liked Dragon Heist. I think it was less of the module and more because we had built on to it from previous adventures and had more linking us to the city. the CE skeleton wizard I ended up playing. Wife ended up joining in the middle as a warforged fighter and the excuse we used for her sudden intro was that my character built her in the attic of the party's house after ripping off what he saw in the Temple of Gond and reasoning that if a good creator turned out something evil, he, being utterly evil, could use those same plans and the result would be something friendly.
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Jul 8, 2020 14:26
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Arcsech posted:My biggest peeve about pretty much all the official 5e content being rehashes of old stuff is that they aren't even rehashing the cool old stuff. They could have put out a new Planescape book! Or Spelljammer! Or Dark Sun! But instead we got... Icewind Dale?
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Jul 8, 2020 15:15
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Halloween Jack posted:"A different part of the Forgotten Realms" is as far-out as they're willing to get, apparently. not even a very different very far away part. doing an adventure that's not on the sword coast would be really, really nice
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Jul 8, 2020 15:21
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I've not even been the biggest critic of WotC's handling of 5e but  if you think they would handle a Dark Sun book well.I feel pretty sure Planescape is the next big book cause the Rune Fighter and all the other shenanigans revolving around Spell Tattoos in UA content sound like it.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:22
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Halloween Jack posted:"A different part of the Forgotten Realms" is as far-out as they're willing to get, apparently. Even at that, it'd be nice to see Kara-tur or Maztica again. Just, y'know, make sure to hire a team of people from those places to write something that's not orientalism or savagery porn. Doing that is probably to large a challenge for Wizards though given how they've treated previous freelancers of colour.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:22
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Monathin posted:I've not even been the biggest critic of WotC's handling of 5e but rune fighters and spell tattoos are from the FR, my apologies for destroying your hopes
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Jul 8, 2020 15:23
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ah. well, nevertheless.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:25
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Yeah Curse of Strahd is the only non-FR adventure isn't it At least do an Eberron adventure or something.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:25
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I feel like they keep trying to bank off of sweet sweet name recognition.... Of references most of the D&D crowd doesn't even know because they're new and coming in from friend recs or like Critical Role or something. They know Grog and Scanlan, but couldn't tell you who Drizzt or Eliminster are. So the adventure is like, "you see....JARLAXLE!" and the response is just "ok, cool, drow. Got it." But instead of creating cool new settings for new players to get steeped in the lore of, they're just hammering this old stuff that most don't know or care about.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:26
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An official Kara-tur splatbook would be such a glorious car crash
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Jul 8, 2020 15:26
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tgacon posted:For real. I’m running my group through Avernus, and the last chapter is literally 8 pages long. It is just “here is about eight ways the endgame could happen—just figure it out. Lol” i am going to keep it real though, i think no adventure path should have a strictly written ending. "figure it out Lol" is how endings should go for a tabletop game because unlike a video game, there are not prewritten dialogue trees that set flags for endings. i think having a few vague ways an ending could happen is ideal because if there was a 20 page grand ending scene it is almost guaranteed to invalidate some unforeseen choices the players organically came up with
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Jul 8, 2020 15:32
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pog boyfriend posted:i am going to keep it real though, i think no adventure path should have a strictly written ending. "figure it out Lol" is how endings should go for a tabletop game because unlike a video game, there are not prewritten dialogue trees that set flags for endings. i think having a few vague ways an ending could happen is ideal because if there was a 20 page grand ending scene it is almost guaranteed to invalidate some unforeseen choices the players organically came up with I agree with this, a lot of the worst horror stories are from DMs railroading their players. "Here are some options" is probably the best choice
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Jul 8, 2020 15:34
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Saxophone posted:I feel like they keep trying to bank off of sweet sweet name recognition.... Of references most of the D&D crowd doesn't even know because they're new and coming in from friend recs or like Critical Role or something. The alternative option is to make the fans care about these characters and settings, but that requires supplements and novels and more detailed products that WotC doesn't want to do. I can easily write up a page on why Jarlaxle's cool and why you should care about him, but WotC won't put that anywhere. They don't have the space or bandwidth for it.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:35
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Blockhouse posted:Yeah Curse of Strahd is the only non-FR adventure isn't it Ghosts of Saltmarsh is from Greyhawk if that makes even a modicum of difference.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:45
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Arivia posted:The alternative option is to make the fans care about these characters and settings, but that requires supplements and novels and more detailed products that WotC doesn't want to do. I can easily write up a page on why Jarlaxle's cool and why you should care about him, but WotC won't put that anywhere. They don't have the space or bandwidth for it. Granted, but a ton of people playing D&D in the past few years have been people with no exposure to it before/otherwise. They're new players coming into the TTRPG blind at friend recommendations, or because they wanted to see what it was all about, etc. So even if there is good supplemental material and novels and such, they're not going to be aware of them, and probably only invest AFTER they get into a setting.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:49
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Saxophone posted:Granted, but a ton of people playing D&D in the past few years have been people with no exposure to it before/otherwise. They're new players coming into the TTRPG blind at friend recommendations, or because they wanted to see what it was all about, etc. So even if there is good supplemental material and novels and such, they're not going to be aware of them, and probably only invest AFTER they get into a setting. That's not true: the way it used to work, the novels greatly outsold the actual gaming products. You'd have more people coming in by buying novels and then afterwards playing the actual game; this only changed with 5e basically shutting off novels. 5e would be an utter failure of an edition if it wasn't for the amazingly lucky coincidence of Actual Plays blowing up at the same time.
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Jul 8, 2020 15:52
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Toshimo posted:Of the official hardcovers, the only one I'd actively recommend is SKT. SKT good. Isaacs Alter Ego posted:Storm King's Thunder seems to be the best put together official campaign I've tried yet, it had a pretty decent amount of choice and good hooks to keep the party invested, and I never noticed the DM having to flounder around to cover up crappy parts of the material. Cool, this was the book I had my eye on. Was going to run all of the Season 5 (SKT) Adventurer's League modules start to end in Foundry, then pull together a non-AL table of players to do the book (hopefully in person, gently caress you 'rona  )ToA looks neat as well and I like the setting but the thought of having the party endlessly fart around in an overland hex jungle sort of put me off to it
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Jul 8, 2020 16:00
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Arivia posted:That's not true: the way it used to work, the novels greatly outsold the actual gaming products. You'd have more people coming in by buying novels and then afterwards playing the actual game; this only changed with 5e basically shutting off novels. 5e would be an utter failure of an edition if it wasn't for the amazingly lucky coincidence of Actual Plays blowing up at the same time. But that's my point. New people coming in aren't invested in the novels or the lore, just the game itself and the actual play content. So when you drop a Drizzt or a Jarlaxle on them it fall extremely flat, and when your module relies on that for cool factor instead of, you know, actually good gaming content, it winds up not good.
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Jul 8, 2020 16:09
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Syrinxx posted:Cool, this was the book I had my eye on. Was going to run all of the Season 5 (SKT) Adventurer's League modules start to end in Foundry, then pull together a non-AL table of players to do the book (hopefully in person, gently caress you 'rona I started running a ToA game before real life petered things out, and I will say you don't necessarily have to do the hexcrawl in a tedious drawn out way. As long as you can make sure the party has a guide and picks up a fair few of the breadcrumb clues in Port Nyanzaru, you can make the jungle exploration a lot less time-wastey. The key thing, I think, is to make sure to make clear that travelling on water is much faster and easier than travelling over land--as long as the players decide to either travel upriver or round the coasts to their first destinations, you can make sure they know where they're going and can get there without getting lost and bored. The early jungle stuff boils down to the party having to answer two questions: Where is the source of the curse? (Omu) and Where is Omu? There's usually an answer to one of these questions either in or near the places you can get quests to visit from those living in Nyanzaru. And all you really need to do as the DM to trim the hexcrawl to something more direct is make sure every location in the adventure has clues that tell the players where to find other locations. You can still do a slimmed hexcrawl, but it's more in the vein of "the diary says we'll find the shrine of whatever five days travel east of the lake", than "lets head one hex south. [DM roll] Nothing? Uh, one hex south again."
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Jul 8, 2020 16:15
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Saxophone posted:But that's my point. New people coming in aren't invested in the novels or the lore, just the game itself and the actual play content. So when you drop a Drizzt or a Jarlaxle on them it fall extremely flat, and when your module relies on that for cool factor instead of, you know, actually good gaming content, it winds up not good. I don’t know if you’re not reading what I’m saying or if you’re just not getting it so I’ll try again: introducing new players to significant setting and character elements is not an insurmountable task. It was done successfully for decades with D&D. WotC has hosed it up in 5e, but referencing the larger setting in and of itself isn’t a failure of the 5e adventures, it’s a failure of product line design to tie the whole thing together.
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Jul 8, 2020 16:15
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Reveilled posted:It's nuts isn't it. You hear that and think, "surely that must be wrong", but no, as written in the module, there is literally no heist. The only sense in which there is a heist is in the following two senses which are extreme stretches: So by this logic Rime of the Frostmaiden is gonna be in the desert, right?
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Jul 8, 2020 16:19
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Arivia posted:I don’t know if you’re not reading what I’m saying or if you’re just not getting it so I’ll try again: introducing new players to significant setting and character elements is not an insurmountable task. It was done successfully for decades with D&D. WotC has hosed it up in 5e, but referencing the larger setting in and of itself isn’t a failure of the 5e adventures, it’s a failure of product line design to tie the whole thing together. There's no need for snark. I'm not really disagreeing with that other than self-reference not being a gently caress-up. It absolutely is because the module (and a lot of D&D 5e content) feels like it relies on the cool factor of established lore when the current surge of player base is coming in because D&D is trendy right now and they want to play this game their friends are playing. These are not the same people that would be coming in because they read novels and now want to play in that setting. They are separate groups. It absolutely is a gently caress up that they didn't capitalize on product lines for settings. I'm saying they ALSO hosed up because they're misjudging their player base by thinking established lore will be a cool factor and try to ride the Elminster coattails. Or robe tails.
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Jul 8, 2020 16:27
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