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nelson posted:An adventure is not the place for a lore dump. Maybe he can write a series of novels instead. I have to disagree a bit here. Many of the monsters that are D&D staples where first introduced in modules
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Mar 22, 2021 18:00
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Rutibex posted:I have to disagree a bit here. Many of the monsters that are D&D staples where first introduced in modules If the level of lore is the monster exists, that’s fine. What is inappropriate is a bunch of stuff that only exists to entertain the DM that is never conveyed to the players.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:06
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nelson posted:If the level of lore is the monster exists, that’s fine. What is inappropriate is a bunch of stuff that only exists to entertain the DM that is never conveyed to the players. I'm unsure you've ever actually read many RPG adventures. Also weird you assume the lore exists only to entertain the DM.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:16
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nelson posted:If the level of lore is the monster exists, that’s fine. What is inappropriate is a bunch of stuff that only exists to entertain the DM that is never conveyed to the players.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:21
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change my name posted:I agree with this but as an editor myself, going in and making big changes without even... telling the author is a huge no-no I really think this is getting overlooked. They want that author's name on the module because they know they've got a problem and with that they can say "look, we understand the problem, we're trying to fix it, and they're helping". Then they go and literally do exactly what they're ostensibly trying not to do, and use the author's name to do it. Any argument about whether what the author was trying to do with lore dumps in a module is good or not is absolutely beside the point. If they didn't want that, that's literally the editor's job to work with the author to get that result. Doing this and then not even bothering to tell the author, who's good name they're trying to use to sell the drat thing, is incredibly scummy behavior. There's nothing defensible about what WotC did on this.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:35
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Splicer posted:Background info is very important. There's a big difference between running a module with a bunch of orcs who hate humans and halflings because there was a bunch of humans were a bunch of assholes to them five decades back and you're the first humans they've seen since vs a bunch of orcs who just hate pinkskins just because, you know, orcs, even if the history doesn't end up being explicitly described to the PCs. Disagree. If the players have no way of knowing about it then it doesn’t matter and just wastes precious space.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:40
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nelson posted:Disagree. If the players have no way of knowing about it then it doesn’t matter and just wastes precious space. Hmmm... yes, there's absolutely no way that a Dungeon Master, the one in control of the adventure, could possibly convey lore or background information to players.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:44
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nelson posted:Disagree. If the players have no way of knowing about it then it doesn’t matter and just wastes precious space.
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Mar 22, 2021 18:45
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Lore and backstory is super cool and good if there is meaningful interaction the players can have with it. The group of orcs hating the local village because the local village hired some mercs to drive the orcs out of their home so the village could get at the sweet sweet gold is great backstory because players can and should find that out and then have a moral decision their hands. Girgen Muckswiggler, orc fighter, who was a pacifist before a kraken ate his dog, and made a bargain with Buttshit the Demon to bring his dog back, but his only part in the story is Orc Guard #3 - that's lovely backstory and lore that has no place in a published product. Edit: I have not read Candlekeep Mysteries so I don't know the exact details of what was going on there. HOwever, I have read quite a few other published adventures and they are chock FULL of dumb as rocks backstory bullshit that would never organically come up in playtime and would have no impact on how the PCs go about their business. Rise of the Runelords, I'm looking at you. Lucas Archer fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 18:57
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Splicer posted:I challenge anyone to find any "<noun> is not the place for deep lore" that could not be immediately contradicted by dozens of existing Forgotten Realms products. Just because I want to see the thing that proves me wrong: polyhedral dice. Go!
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Mar 22, 2021 19:53
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Splicer posted:I challenge anyone to find any "<noun> is not the place for deep lore" that could not be immediately contradicted by dozens of existing Forgotten Realms products. Not just FR products, but D&D products in general. Those DL modules are brimming with Dragonlance lore because they're introducing the setting and its lore. nelson posted:If the level of lore is the monster exists, that’s fine. What is inappropriate is a bunch of stuff that only exists to entertain the DM that is never conveyed to the players. The stuff that "only exists to entertain the DM" is the stuff that contextualizes the monster's existence and gives the DM framework for connecting the monster to and using the monster in other adventures.
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Mar 22, 2021 19:57
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Glazius posted:Just because I want to see the thing that proves me wrong: polyhedral dice. Go! https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/explorers-kit I'm assuming a polyhedral set in the colors of the mayor or whatever of Waterdeep that comes with a bunch of cards where she opines at length about various FR locations will count.
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Mar 22, 2021 20:20
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theironjef posted:https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/explorers-kit This is the one 5e product I actually own, lol. I picked it up to have a spare map to hand to players that I don’t need to panic about being ruined. Keeping dice in a tray on my desk has actually been really helpful for prep. For another example, Goodman Games prints exclusive monsters in their dice sets. Arivia fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 20:41
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nelson posted:Disagree. If the players have no way of knowing about it then it doesn’t matter and just wastes precious space. if only there was a skill players could use to find out information about obscure knowledge and historical events. alas. there is nothing wrong with adding lore, if dms are running adventures in the canonical forgotten realms they will have more to work with. if the dms are stripping modules for parts and homebrewing original connections they are ignoring the lore anyway the issue with the books is more how uneven and poorly accessible the presentation of the information is, making it hard for dms to use the info as the information is not laid out practically from the perspective of teaching someone how to run this game. there is nothing intrinsically wrong with more information
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Mar 22, 2021 21:42
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pog boyfriend posted:if only there was a skill players could use to find out information about obscure knowledge and historical events. alas. there is nothing wrong with adding lore, if dms are running adventures in the canonical forgotten realms they will have more to work with. if the dms are stripping modules for parts and homebrewing original connections they are ignoring the lore anyway It has to have some context though. Players don’t just run around asking to make history checks at random. There has to be an in-game reason for it.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:08
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nelson posted:It has to have some context though. Players don’t just run around asking to make history checks at random. There has to be an in-game reason for it. https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1374050198171774976 Yeah, they're two very different adventures
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Mar 22, 2021 22:17
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Yeah, not that I can know what was in PanzerLion's original drafts but the published adventure (spoilers if anyone cares) features a climactic encounter with some Yuan-Ti performing a ritual by sacrificing prisoners. It clarifies that mechanically the players must interrupt the ritual within a certain number of rounds or it will succeed. At no point does it describe what the purpose of the ritual is or what happens if it succeeds other than that the prisoners die. So it's not just pointless background information that is missing, the antagonists have no concrete motivation whatsoever. Also two of the ritual guards are given proper names and no other description whatsoever lol.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:24
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I know I'm a typical GM, in that I own far more supplements and modules than I've ever run; on that basis, actually, the primary purpose of a successful RPG supplement product is to entertain the GM. Often exclusively. Managing to make it to a table and entertain a party of players is a nice bonus. I'm only kinda half-joking about this.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:49
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Leperflesh posted:I know I'm a typical GM, in that I own far more supplements and modules than I've ever run; on that basis, actually, the primary purpose of a successful RPG supplement product is to entertain the GM. Often exclusively. Managing to make it to a table and entertain a party of players is a nice bonus. I'm with you completely. poo poo doesn't make it to the table unless it entertained someone first. And if anyone finds the term "entertain" too low-brow for our serious elf-games, just replace it with something like "inspires the imagination".
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Mar 22, 2021 23:22
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I mean I do get it, it's frustrating to see limited wordcount spent on something that doesn't actually help the adventure function if a module is also apparently missing stuff that you wanted to have, instead. But I don't think that having the fun flavor stuff is bad, taken on its own. If it helps inspire me to want to run the adventure, that's functionality of a kind, and if it gives me ideas for additional hooks, lets me have something prepared if a character actually wants to learn more, or gives me a platform on which to improvise additional detail/events/sideplots on the fly, those are all good things too. There's undoubtedly cases where the author really just wanted to write their fiction, and is using the conceit of an adventure module to do that, resulting in an adventure module that kind of sucks, too.
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Mar 22, 2021 23:30
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Azathoth posted:I really think this is getting overlooked. Strongly agreed. I think regardless of one's individual opinions on what place lore should take in adventure module design, WotC's relationship with freelance creators is loving atrocious. Even independent of the company's ongoing problems with POC creators, not at least giving a freelance writer a glance at the final version of their work before official release is a major dick move. That they're pulling this with a creator they hired in an attempt to improve their relationship to their POC fanbase is...mind bogglingly gross.
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Mar 22, 2021 23:51
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I was a little miffed when my AL module was published before I got to see a final draft. And that was with only minor edits that didn't include added racism. 
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Mar 23, 2021 00:01
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nelson posted:It has to have some context though. Players don’t just run around asking to make history checks at random. There has to be an in-game reason for it. they actually 100% completely do. players will latch on to something that seems cool and make a big deal out of it, and you cant really anticipate what things players are going to make a big deal out of. so, as was mentioned by posting phenom splicer: Splicer posted:https://twitter.com/POCGamer/status/1374050198171774976 if players see these yuan ti acting up and doing evil poo poo, its not unreasonable to assume the players are going to ask themselves "why are the yuan ti doing this?" and this is where that lore comes into play in a very important way. if you say "the yuan ti are evil because yuan ti are all evil" this certainly answers the question but the level of depth in this question is lower than the players interest level. if the players wanted to know the evil guys are doing evil things because they are evil they wouldnt even ask the question, they would just assume that and never ask a question because the fact they are doing evil things is enough of a justification. the reason they are asking for the motives of these characters is because they are interested in the story and want to dig deeper than the immediately obvious and taking the lore out leaves the DM with nothing to work with.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:19
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Never thought I'd see people try to defend novels disguised as gameable adventures, but I guess it's as close to CYOA as you can get
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Mar 23, 2021 01:36
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Honestly I think you’re overestimating the published product. The answer is even weaker than asserting the Yuan-Ti are evil and therefore do evil things: there are some good Yuan-Ti in the adventure, there is no backstory provided about why one faction of Yuan-Ti is good and the other is evil. They just are and the goals of the evil Yuan-Ti are completely unknown besides “complete a ritual”. What does the ritual do, what makes it evil? Unspecified.
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Mar 23, 2021 01:39
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Leperflesh posted:I know I'm a typical GM, in that I own far more supplements and modules than I've ever run; on that basis, actually, the primary purpose of a successful RPG supplement product is to entertain the GM. Often exclusively. Managing to make it to a table and entertain a party of players is a nice bonus. Yeah this is 100% the case. I consume 100x more RPG book content than I actually end up bringing to the table. Of course it's all justified and worth my time because it makes me better at improvisation! (I say to myself)
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Mar 23, 2021 01:58
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Yeah, given how bland the final cut is, they might have well have just cut the adventure from the book and gone. "Sorry, it's way over word count, we can't use it." At least then they could have used the space for something more interesting. As it is they basically took out anything interesting, and had to give it a tone-deaf edit job to even do that.
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Mar 23, 2021 02:00
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Leperflesh posted:I know I'm a typical GM, in that I own far more supplements and modules than I've ever run; on that basis, actually, the primary purpose of a successful RPG supplement product is to entertain the GM. Often exclusively. Managing to make it to a table and entertain a party of players is a nice bonus. I wouldn't want to run an adventure that didn't entertain me. If I'm not stoked about it how are the player's gonna be?
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Mar 23, 2021 02:32
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Eggnogium posted:Honestly I think you’re overestimating the published product. The answer is even weaker than asserting the Yuan-Ti are evil and therefore do evil things: there are some good Yuan-Ti in the adventure, there is no backstory provided about why one faction of Yuan-Ti is good and the other is evil. They just are and the goals of the evil Yuan-Ti are completely unknown besides “complete a ritual”. What does the ritual do, what makes it evil? Unspecified. thats actually extremely funny to me given that there was a perfectly serviceable plot they threw out in lieu of this for some reason
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Mar 23, 2021 02:42
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Honestly, I don't see how anyone could defend these edits? Like, it's one thing to strip out deep lore and player options, and it's another to remove antagonist motivations, important setting information for the adventure, a complex interaction of social interactions, all to add in, and let me check my notes here, yes, what they added was racism. There is absolutely no need to be charitable to WotC to any degree here, and those that are doing so are doing so either out of a misguided loyalty to the multinational corporation or because they want the racism to be there, and, honestly, neither is a good look.
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Mar 23, 2021 16:20
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It's especially crazy after WotC made such a huge amount of noise about listening to PoC and reversing their history, and then literally add racism and remove context from content by a guy with PoC in his twitter handle. It's too on the nose.
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Mar 23, 2021 16:44
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So on the nose it could be a mask awareness campaign
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Mar 23, 2021 16:49
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 I haven't given Wizards of the Coast a dime in years, it a big corporation they have plenty of money. I bought more than enough books from TSR to consider myself to have a lifetime license to play D&D. And they put the 5e SRD out on the web you dont even need the books really. If I am going to spend money on RPG material I support small time creators on DrivethroughRPG
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Mar 23, 2021 16:51
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Meinberg posted:Honestly, I don't see how anyone could defend these edits? Like, it's one thing to strip out deep lore and player options, and it's another to remove antagonist motivations, important setting information for the adventure, a complex interaction of social interactions, all to add in, and let me check my notes here, yes, what they added was racism. There is absolutely no need to be charitable to WotC to any degree here, and those that are doing so are doing so either out of a misguided loyalty to the multinational corporation or because they want the racism to be there, and, honestly, neither is a good look. What did they add in? From what I could gather, it's that they redacted several paragraphs of lovingly described architecture down to "primitive" and in doing so opened the floodgates to a bunch of racist colonialist tropes. Was there anything more extensive added in? To my mind the cutting stuff out isn't so much the issue as the absolutely tone-deaf way it was done. (Player facing content like PC character creation rules seems like the kind of thing that would basically always have been cut before the final draft, and I can totally see why fluff material, even important stuff, would get cut to meet word count.) To be clear, the tone-deaf edit job was dumb and racist and absolutely should have been avoided by just telling the author "this is over word count, we need to cut 2000 words" and letting the writer have a say in what was cut. And now the weird damage control WotC trying to do with the most recent is deeply stupid. The whole thing reeks of a botched rush-job.
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Mar 23, 2021 17:25
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Hidingo Kojimba posted:What did they add in? From what I could gather, it's that they redacted several paragraphs of lovingly described architecture down to "primitive" and in doing so opened the floodgates to a bunch of racist colonialist tropes. Was there anything more extensive added in? To my mind the cutting stuff out isn't so much the issue as the absolutely tone-deaf way it was done. (Player facing content like PC character creation rules seems like the kind of thing that would basically always have been cut before the final draft, and I can totally see why fluff material, even important stuff, would get cut to meet word count.) They literally added the word "primitive" to descriptions, where that word was not used at all in earlier drafts.
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Mar 23, 2021 17:56
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Rutibex posted:
When something is outed as racist, the take of "Well then I shall continue to consume it, but for free" isn't the support you may think it is.
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Mar 23, 2021 17:58
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Hidingo Kojimba posted:What did they add in? From what I could gather, it's that they redacted several paragraphs of lovingly described architecture down to "primitive" and in doing so opened the floodgates to a bunch of racist colonialist tropes. Was there anything more extensive added in? To my mind the cutting stuff out isn't so much the issue as the absolutely tone-deaf way it was done. (Player facing content like PC character creation rules seems like the kind of thing that would basically always have been cut before the final draft, and I can totally see why fluff material, even important stuff, would get cut to meet word count.) They specifically went back in and not only added "primitive" but also really leaned in heavily on biological determinism (aka "this race is only good, this race is only evil, except for this faction of this evil race, which is only good"), which is racist AF and a huge complaint with 5e overall. I'm sure they didn't intend to be racist, but this is specific behavior that they've been called out for doing before, which they've acknowledged is a problem and that they've pledged to stop doing. Like, this wasn't just an editor cutting what an author said without telling them, which is itself lovely. This is an editor taking the words written by a PoC author and making them racist. Absolutely no excuse for this poo poo.
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Mar 23, 2021 18:28
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theironjef posted:When something is outed as racist, the take of "Well then I shall continue to consume it, but for free" isn't the support you may think it is. That's fair enough. WotC is a powerful media company and they have used their influence to shape what games are played. If I want to play a role-playing game my best option to find players is D&D 5e, and WotC is responsible for that situation. If I wanted to boycott playing 5e than I would be denying myself a fun activity between my friends and I. I can deny money to WotC, but I'm not going to let them control if I play D&D or not. Its not their game, its mine.
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Mar 23, 2021 18:40
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Rutibex posted:That's fair enough. WotC is a powerful media company and they have used their influence to shape what games are played. If I want to play a role-playing game my best option to find players is D&D 5e, and WotC is responsible for that situation. Genuinely sorry you literally can't think of a way to play RPGs without consistently needing to use the racist tools to do so.
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Mar 23, 2021 18:48
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Azathoth posted:I'm sure they didn't intend to be racist Given the hue and cry that they cannot possibly be ignorant of, and the fact that this keeps happening, I'm less and less inclined to give WotC the benefit of the doubt here.
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Mar 23, 2021 18:50
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