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My only critisism of this video is that it felt more aimed at the content around lore and flavour rather than rules, for myself, rules are important as a neurodivergent person as it sets a baseline of what to work towards/expect, and then after that going by the addage that "to break the rules you must know how they work" dnd and other games i think rules matter because it allows all players to have a chacne to come to any game with a base understnading of what theyre getting into. Regardless, your points are correct i just dont think they fully match the video i was expecting, i look forward to your next video :)
As a nerodivegent person I like rules but only if they make sense to me, I've notice others who like rules are, people who like security and Consistency those who don't like rules feel trapped and confined.
This was a response video to the notion that orcs must be evil or not. 1. Mike puts out a video saying many people see old school orcs as evil. 2. Commenters say they will run orcs how they want (either positive or negative). 3. Mike is responding to these comments. This is why it's more of a flavor discussion rather than hard rules discussion.
@@MySqueezingArm I've never understood this "old school orcs are evil" thing. I've been playing since the black box and Champions of Mystara and I never ran into "the rules say these are evil so they're all genetically evil" until the 2020s. Not even once, in over 30 years of playing with different groups and at conventions, not until the post-Mordenkainen's alignment kerfuffle. Gruumsh isn't even old school, he's a Deities and Demigods addition after the Satanic panic, and doesn't become the Gruumsh we know as cartoonish evil until the 3.0 release of Forgotten Realms. Orcs as elementally evil is a WotC thing. For TSR, the full description was "Ugly, bad-tempered, animalistic humanoids who live underground and are active at night. Sadistic bullies who hate other living creatures and delight in killing." for years -- obviously not good guys but nowhere near the "Tribe of he who watches" level cartoon caricatures of evil they created for 5E.
@@josephcarriveau9691 You can run them however you want. I grew up playing AD&D and 3.5. Our Orcs were effectively Urakai from Lord of the Rings. More or less evil demon things. I don't get why other people who play this way feel the need to correct others. Having the default be 'They're a different culture, respect it' seems good to me.
I got into DM'ing from seeing Adventuring Party clips featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan encouraging people to DM, and noting the DM's ability and responsibility to put their own spin on things & help it be a good time at the table 👍 Changing rules and winging it is in my blood... ...AND! Mike's take on this is EXTREMELY GOOD. I ran a game on the Plane of Fire, and all the official WOTC lore says the main city there is extremely defined by its slavery. It was a lot of prep work to overhaul the main conceit of THE major hub of this game!!! A lot of the official D&D content either doesn't fit my game, or is actively repelling to my players. I don't mind doing the work, because I love my table. But I wish it wasn't so necessary so often. Great video, it really made me think.
My take on homebrewing is to use it sparingly, and stick as closely to RAW as possible. With that said, that's my take. It has no bearing on how someone else decides to run their games.
First and Foremost: IT IS A GAME! If you as a player want to model a politically correct modern world, you will definitely be unhappy at my table. If you are offended by the publisher's content, please remember that,(a) it is fantasy which is NOT designed to reflect reality at any point ( your subterranean born, black skinned, dark elf mage, who worships the Spider Queen , and is feared and discriminated against, reflects REALITY? REALLY?) (b) is there for people to have FUN (and discussing whether or not this is in the "rule" book or having an argument over whether or not the rules allow XXXX, is NOT fun for anyone. I got into gaming way back in AD&D2e days, went thru the arguments weekly, and hunted around for something better - and found GURPS by Steve Jackson Games. So, I, and the core group of players switched in the early 80s, and have been playing GURPS 3eRevised ever since. GURPS is NOT perfect, but we extremely seldom have rules issues, and since ALL of us have GM'd at one point or another, we feel comfortable discussing rules that have issues, and agreeing to changes. And the emphasis is that ALL the "rules" are optional; and we don't worry about game "balance" other than making sure everyone has their PC participating during the game session.
I’m sorry to hear that you feel a “politically correct” game is antithetical to your idea of a fun time with your friends. I truly can’t understand taking pride in the idea that your game would be alienating to people who just want the world to be better for everyone, and who just want everyone to express a bit of compassion and empathy toward others. If you were to ask me, that just seems like a really sad hill to die on. Regardless, I do hope you have a wonderful day.
The biggest reason why what WotC does matters is that as the commonly distributed common reference, they set the baseline that everyone has to decide whether to abide by or diverge from. Even if you decide to change it, the fact that it was there and that you had to react to it means that it's in your head and you have to handle it SOMEHOW.
A friend of mine played her Tiefling Warlock as a victim of extreme prejudice for a three-year campaign, despite no such prejudice existing in our DM's world. Those first impressions from two sentences in the PHB really cemented that idea in her head, even to this day.
There are people in the real world who act like victims of extreme prejudice, even when no such prejudice exists. I would have used this as an opportunity to give the character opportunity to see and recognize that no such prejudice exists.
Not the video I expected, but still solid. Based on the title, I thought it was going to be more about game balancing, like how bending one rule here or there warps other rules. My favorite example of this is how I don't like flanking advantage because on the surface it looks fun, but it makes something that is supposed to be rare almost trivial to achieve, giving up niche protection. Like how an Oath of Vengeance Paladin is supposed to have to spend one of their precious once per short rest Channel Divinities to gain advantage on one target in the combat, but instead if they have one melee buddy, they can position each other to get advantage on whoever they want.
Hey Mike, great video. Personally, I wish you spent more time talking about... I think two topics. I actually really WANT to talk about these topics. One, about Lore being a total experience. If its bad lore, it should be changed or disposed of. Its a great experience for players to show up feeling like they are ready to dive into a universe they know, and its WOTCs responsibility to deliver on that. This doesn't effect me that much, because I have my own setting, with my own lore, etc. But I think its important. Two, on how GMs have enough on their plate to now try and generate new mechanics or revise old ones. I am trying to run this adventure already. Coming up with well-thought out, fun-to-use, and balanced mechanics that normally require years of playtesting on top of that? No way! You could even apply this to the Hadozee discussion. I am not qualified (I know I am not) to make a properly sensitive and yet engaging piece of lore for the Hadozee while also doing these other things. I bought spelljammer! I expect the person I paid to make my ttrpg rules to take these things into account.
TBH, I’ve always hated the “just homebrew it” defense of something because it always feels like someone trying to deflect an issue rather than actually discuss it. Spelljammer is the biggest offender of this IMO, both for the Hadozee situation and for the rules in the book. While yes I could “just homebrew it”, that doesn’t excuse the fact that WotC made something that doesn’t work, and should be pointed out as such. I also feel like this is an argument that puts an unfair amount of work on DMs. DMs already have a ton on their plate normally, and part of the point of using WotC materials is that you don’t have to come up with stuff yourself. If you need to completely rewrite a section of a module because it’s poorly made, or if you need to rework a monster that was supposedly on-CR for your party, then you’re effectively having to do the designers job for them. While I understand that DMs will always have to make stuff up on the fly, and no module or monster can account for every single party, I also think that DMs shouldn’t have to remake the adventure by themselves if they don’t want to just because it’s poorly designed. Great video, I think you really hit the nail on the head on why this argument is a flawed response to criticism.
Had this feeling when I ran Descent Into Avernus game and realized why so many people said to skip to Chapter 2 of the book as the opening is a broken, impossible challenge for a group of 6 level 1 characters, let alone the three players I had. It shouldn't be my responsibility to completely fix every encounter or look through the monster manual to replace creatures to provide a fighting chance.
Absolutely. While homebrewing is significantly less work than modding in a videogame, like with modding, the ability to homebrew something doesn't excuse products where you pretty much have to homebrew stuff (outside of the normal "And then my players decided to do something the rules had no reasonable way of accounting for it so I had to homebrew it on the fly/were interested in exploring something that doesn't quite fit the expected tone of the game so we worked out homebrew for that" style stuff that any game with a simulationist approach is going to wind up encountering because you can't think of everything)
This isn't really about rules is it? You're speaking about setting lore. Which doesn't invalidate your points at all, I just wish the video's title matched. All the same, the bit you said about changing rules was helpful to me. I love to write up settings, and I'm comfortable with changing lore and even rules to suit the campaign. (Two examples. I once wrote a setting where elves tend to be happy-go-lucky because they know they'll just reincarnate if they die . . . the elven cycle makes it easy not to sweat the small stuff. I also eliminated the Crossbow Expert feat because D&D crossbows already reload impossibly fast without going full Hawk the Slayer.) However, any time a game goes wrong my mind leaps to "maybe it's gone wrong because I changed the rules." It's silly, and hearing you say out loud that we're expected to use our judgement and change things for our games helps to counter that instinct. So, thanks for that!
I recently had a Lich encounter in my campaign. Ever since the early 1980's in AD&D, the reliquary where a Lich hides their soul has been referred to as a "phylactery". This references a real world item that Orthodox Jews like myself use every morning during prayer. In earlier editions of the game there were magical phylacteries that could be used by good aligned player characters, like the Phylactery of Faithfulness. Also the description of this item as used by the Lich was vaguer. Around the time of 3.X Wizards of the Coast changed the description of the item in the Monster Manual to more closely describe the holy items I have sitting in a velvet bag two feet away from where I'm sitting as I type this. This has bothered a lot of people, Jewish and non-Jewish for some time, so much so that Paizo and EN Publishing have both renamed this item to a "soul cage" or "soul vessel" to avoid harm. In my encounter with the Lich I had a Mimir, a skull-like item that records and retells lore point out to my players' characters in universe not to call this item a "phylactery". However the use of "phylactery" in WotC products is so ingrained, that even I found my self slipping up, even though I wanted to call the stupid thing a "soul vessel". This should show people how when Wizards of the Coast uses a term in a questionably antisemitic way, the fact that they have used it for decades (and TSR did so before them) makes it difficult to show players a new way forward. Speaking of antisemitic things TSR published that Wizards of the Coast republished unquestioningly within the last sixteen years, in module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, a group of evil elves (not Drow, just evil high elves) are referred to as "Pharisees". These elves are described as "hypocrites" for some reason, and they are secretly in league with Lolth. For those who don't know, the Pharisees were a derogatory term for the Rabbis of the 1st century CE, which was recorded in the Christian Bible for posterity. This use of "Pharisee" in Q1 is blatantly antisemitic, and TSR of course reprinted Q1 in GDQ1-7 Queen of Spiders unchanged. Fast forward to the late 2000's, and Wizards of the Coast prints Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, a reimagining of Queen of Spiders for 3.5. I bought Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which of course is steeped in the racism related to the Drow. It also reprints the reference to the "Pharisee" elves unchanged. Way to go Wizards of the Coast. It doesn't seem likely that WotC will release another adventure that features these elves or their connection to Lolth, but one never knows. After all, Liches still have their "phylacteries" in D&D 5E.
Post watch thoughts: Well, I respectfully still have to disagree. From OD&D, through AD&D 1st and 2nd and beyond, I have never encountered anything I would consider "bad". Silly, yes. Bad, nope. I guess I'd have to chalk this up to a generational aspect. And as far as RAW goes, I'll age myself again and refer to the most important line in the 2E DMG: make it up. Rules for action resolution are critical for the game, but beyond that, the DM is supposed to administrate.
While I do not disagree about the Hadozee example specifically, I think a lot of the discussion is due to a mismatch of what the content actually is trying to do. A novel, TV show or movie will set up an antagonist, drama will occur, and then the protagonists win in the end. A D&D book aimed at dungeon masters (such as Spelljammer or Fizbans) can really only do the first part, leaving a non-DM reader with unresolved antagonists, something that is unique to this medium. It is up to each individual play table to then take this conflict and resolve it, something that for a vast majority of tables happens in private. This is why I have less of a problem with books that say "here are some creatures that we have designed as explicitly evil antagonists". While we wish every DM would only run Game of Thrones-style grey villains with deep backstories, sometimes you need goblins to kidnap the blacksmith's kids, and talking won't get the party very far in trying to free them.
I 100% agree with this to the extent that these villains can still be a mixed bag of offensiveness to some players. This is where I think it's up to DM's to showcase nuance with even the kidnapping goblins, as maybe there are ways to humanize otherwise villainous behavior.
The really interesting part of your thought is that it touches on the big issue of races/ancestries/alien species/whatever: there is a huge difference between "characters with a role in this story" and an entire civilization, or a whole class of living being. It's not okay to describe all Japanese people of the 18th Century as obsessing over swords or running around in black masks throwing shuriken at samurai. It would be appropriate to write samurai characters in a jidai geki story, though, and hooded ninja with trick weapons work in a fantastical version of feudal Japan. Similarly, it's fine to describe an orc's size, speed, higher physical compared to humans, and the like. Describing them as having a limited range of alignments paints them as not-people, though, and as for the business of official books saying that half-orcs usually exist because of . . . well, let's say "raiding of human territory" . . . forces the audience to see orcs in every game as nothing but monsters, which limits their potential as characters horribly. It would be fine to say "in this adventure the party encounter a raiding band of goblins." It's different to have the official books only describe goblins as raiders who can't understand the cultures of the playable races. Especially when, as of Volo's Guide, goblins _are_ a playable race.
It’s fine to slaughter the human bandits, and it’s fine to slaughter the orc bandits. It’s not OK to say all orcs are bandits any more than it would be to say that all humans are bandits. What role an individual plays in the story should be solely determined by their ancestry.
@@fakjbf3129 Sorry, just checking -- did you mean their role "should _not_ be solely determined by their ancestry"? That's what you seemed to be saying -- kill 'em because they're vicious bandits, not because they're humans/orcs.
I completely agree. This may have been before you started playing TTRPGs, but there was a time when Metaplot was a "Big thing" in certain game lines, where each sourcebook advanced the overall plotline slightly. And for people like me, who weren't fond of metaplot to say the least, we kept being told "you don't have to follow it" but ... each book changed the world slightly, and as they diverged from how my game had developed and the choices I'd made earlier because the relevant book hadn't been published yet, each supliment became less and less useful to me, even for the mechanics because a lot of these games had their mechanics and worlds tied very closely together. Meaning I had to spend more time hacking out homebrew worlds than settings or adventures... and homebrewing mechanics is not my happy fun place when building a game, so they're not my strong suit. Fortunately, most of the companies that supported metaplot have learned better how to divorce it from mechanics, or stopped doing it all together. So I'm only hacking rules when the rules actually don't work, and not when they're simply not a good fit for where my table wants to go. (And that's not even getting into the mess of having the L5R card game tournaments determine the storyline for the L5R TTRPG back when both were owned by AEG. The fiction that produced was awesome, but it made a mess of the world for anyone who didn't care about the card game.)
One thing that I would like to mention is a slightly different perspective. As a rules person who tends to run by Rules as Written... I do not care one whit about how other people run their games. However, when people lobby for a change to the rules of the game, they are lobbying for changes that will change MY game. Because of this... I don't get to ignore those changes. I am going to have people showing up at MY table with new rules, expecting that I will now be bound by them, whether I like it or not. So I have every reason to care about any changes, updates, or modifications of the rules. In addition, if a new player joins one game where everything is Homebrewed... and then wants to join a new group (Maybe they moved) and they wind up at my table...they are likely to be confused and possibly even angry when they suddenly cannot enjoy the Homebrew rules that they are used to. I have seen this happen when someone showed up at a table I was playing at and wanted us to homebrew a overpowered, nonexistent race/ species, and the DM refused. The the player retorted with, "My old DM would have allowed it, because he was OK with us playing anything we could imagine. Isn't this the game where you can play a werewolf?", and she was almost outraged when we advised her that is a player became a werewolf or Vampire and could not be cured, that those creatures were not allowed to be played, and that such characters would be removed from play. She never returned...I don't know if she ever played again. We do not have to care how others play to care very much about how new rules affect OUR play.
@@SLorraineEexactly! I have been GMing and playing since the late 70s, I have plenty of dice, enough to do what I need to do, but recently for my birthday two of my nieces, aged 11 and 13, gave me a set of shiny swirly dice that are prettier than any other dice I own and I love it! My brother ran a one-shot for them, his wife, and myself while I was visiting - the girls played a pair of Tabaxi rogues who were twins nicknamed Double and Trouble. (My shiny new dice served my cleric/warlock well.) My brother and sister-in-law are clearly raising their young adventurers properly. ❤
While you're correct for all of this I like to add a more down to earth argument about why wotc has a responsibility to put out good content: they're selling it. And I don't know the price in America but a dnd physical book here is at least 45 euros, which is quite expensive. If I buy an official adventure book from wotc I should be able to run a good game, and not throw half of it away because it's imbalanced, or too rail roady.
Absolutely. I don't want to pay a fair bit of money only to have to redo a bunch of it! We paid for a playable adventure, and should receive a playable adventure that doesn't NEED a bunch of homebrew revisions to make it playable.
Good video. The one thought I want to share is that I actually agree with W OTC’s decision to get rid of the half Orc. I’ve always felt that the half Orc as it is functions as a way for players to play an Orc character, but “ one of the good ones” which is problematic when the main difference is their mixed genetic make up, specifically the half human part, explicitly determines the character’s intelligence and their potential to be good as opposed to the savage unredeemable full blooded Orc. This is despite the fact that the lore establishes that half Orcs of many kinds (what we call half Orc, Orogs etc. ) are accepted as Orcs within Orc societies and are typically seen and treated like other Orcs by humans. I don’t want to go too deep into why this is problematic, but I hope you can see why. I don’t have the same issues with half elves, but the issue would come up again with an half elf drow character to a lesser extent. I have no problem with a player being a mixed character, but when the rules tie their genetic background to the content of their character, that is an issue for me. I want the player to come up with a reason in the character’s upbringing and experience to inform their motivation and alignment for lack of a better term. Also, I didn’t want to bring this up before, but using the word heritages instead of races isn’t as racially neutral as you seem to think if either term is used to determine their personality by default. To say that a character isn’t a certain way because of their race, but because of their “heritage” just puts a label of prejudice that people who have not experienced prejudice and racism and don’t identify their own race and an integral aspect of their heritage. I don’t want to pile on here. You do great vids and I respect your opinions even when I don’t agree. Just sharing my perspective.
Who, after two seconds of reading or only one session of play, thinks "this entire genre of game isn't for me"? that's like saying "i didn't like family guy so the Simpsons and rick and Morty must also suck" or "I didnt like go fish so i wont like poker either" to me that way of thinking seems unacceptable and i do not understand how someone could come to that conclusion especially in the case of D&D where the whole point is that every game is unique. anyone with that mind set has missed what is so good about not only D&D but all TTRPGs and if it does exist it needs to be addressed
Simply put, there's so much entertainment out there in direct competition. If you're asking the players to get invested enough to learn all the rules, and committed enough to meet every week, AND then the players see something that makes them question if this is the right game for them, then that can spook them away. I only played a Soulsborne game for 20min before feeling it wasn't my type of game. When Elden Ring came out, my friends talked it up in a way that made me think I ought to give the series a second chance. But now it's 50th in line behind a bunch of other hobbies and commitments.
And if they've played for a couple of months of weekly sessions, and the DM is playing the game as it's written, and the material is still making that player uncomfortable, and the DM is running their first TTRPG and hasn't been taught about safety tools because they don't exist in WotC books . . . then it hasn't been two seconds or only one session. People can be new to things and not have the experience necessary to make necessary changes. It happens all the time. Telling someone in a little town that, if they don't like their friend's game, or the only game being run by some guy in town, that they should know how to find a game that's closer to what they want, when they've already had a bad experience, is missing the problem. As with everything else in life, you only get one chance to make a first impression. If the game hits someone wrong because of the world created in its core books, then that's all it takes to send them off to do something else with their time instead.
@@SingularityOrbit That's not my argument. If you tried dnd for a while and decided you don't like it, i couldn't care less, but the idea that someone gave up TTRPGs after seeing DnD at it's worst is Insane and those people need to be less volatile with their judgment. I firmly believe that everyone can find a ttrpg they enjoy, but thats a different point than the one i originally brought up
@@antimonyparanoia People don't give up on things they aren't enjoying because they've tried absolutely everything it has to offer, but because they've encountered something about it that makes them not enjoy it. Nobody other than that person gets to make that decision. If the roleplaying experience is bad _for any reason_ then that person had a bad experience -- but if it was bad because of something in the offiical text of the game then there's no reason for them to believe it's going to get better.
Love that last point. What a lot of people that look like us either don't understand or don't care about is that while yes, you can change things at your table, that doesn't change the fact that [insert Thing In Question] is still doing harm. And unless someone grew up in the community that was harmed, most of us are never taught or exposed to the history we'd need to know to understand why certain things are harmful and how those harms persist into present systems.
If the lore doesn’t matter then don’t get mad when people change it to something they prefer. If the lore does matter then it’s up to the designers to be responsible about what kinds of stuff they put in the lore. But internet trolls want it both ways, they say to not get upset at the developer about problematic lore because it doesn’t really matter but also insist that changing the lore fundamentally breaks the game.
It's good to acknowledge when we're being helpful and when we're being wangrods (#MCDM) but I would love to hear more about the mechanical implications and advice for changing rules than a brief history of lore missteps in D&D. Matt Colville is really good at just workshopping an idea for a mechanic on camera, and I think we all love to get other perspectives of DM's, like how do you approach fulfilling a fantasy of a concept with new mechanical rules, how do you approach balance, and do you have an opinion for what kinds of new/altered rules make for more "fun"?
Exactly! The fact twilight cleric exists means homebrew balance is BEYOND broken. Using official material as the baseline makes less than no sense now since it gives you a license for literally anything you can think of and you can justify it by saying "well WotC made twilight cleric and it's more powerful than this!" The fact initiative is so terrible means people are using it as a baseline and trying to shift the EXISTING system... Because it's already there. Even if it's a bad one, it's still "easier" than making a new one. The fact existing lore is pretty racist and is built on harmful stereotypes created in the 1980s by old white guys means it's OUR responsibility to change it. The racism, just as in the real world with existing institutions, *is the baseline* and anyone who has an issue with it has to change it, basically do their job for them. Or people who don't realise it get harmful stereotypes reinforced subconsciously. Basically the baseline matters. A house on bad foundations cannot stand.
02:23 Tyranny of Dragons is really two modules that you can run back to back. The first, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, is a true railroad (well very largely unless an experienced DM changes it) but it was the first module published for 5e (written even before the rules were finalised) and is intended to introduce DMs and Players into the game so it needs to be a fairly restrictive in the choices offered in order to allow people to get the rules under their belt. It's a social contract that if you sit down to play a WotC campaign book it's going to be somewhat linear in nature - as would any campaign with a defined beginning, middle, and end. (IMO, the worst part of HotDQ is "The Road" that a DM really needs to be a little inventive with to prevent it stodging down.) If the DM allows the players to do whatever they want, they can quickly de-rail the story. For example, one time I ran it, the player characters killed off an important NPC so that they could steal a valuable gem that he was offering them to go and do a tracking mission for him. Rather than taking the deal, they just slew him on the spot, and went on the run doing dastardly deeds until they could be coralled back into the main plot. The second module, Rise of Tiamat, is a much looser format with set piece scenarios that the DM can stitch together woven in with their own content now that they've go some more experience with running the game. There are also sort of intermission points where their progress against the overall objective can be measured (showing DMs how to provide some sense of structure into a more free-form set of adventures). It's not bad, not great, but not bad. But DMs have to be prepared to put work into preparing it rather than just running straight through like you can, but probably shouldn't, with HotDQ. It's easy enough to run RoT alongside something like Princes of the Apocalypse which gives a sort of richer background that that the characters can operate against. You can use PotA in this way for Storm King's Thunder too.
"You can just homebrew it!" Then why the f*ck am I paying these people for? I could also just make my own game. But we pay for someone else to do that labor, and if they don't deliver on that - yes, you should probably go buy a game that delivers better for you.
This video is amazing. It's really awesome to have this in my toolkit now to show folks when I can't articulate my thoughts on this topic. People seem to always seem to assume when I'm critical of DnD, I'm critical of their game at their table instead of ... the major publications put in front of countless folks with little consideration of the consequences of whats written in them. I heard the "well you can just change it" argument all throughout college at my RPG club and I hated it, so this was super cathartic.
Balance is very important to me because danger and risk and consequence are important narrative devices. I think where 5e as written continuously fails is in its gameplay balance. There is very poor balance between classes, between monsters, and between encounters. Trying to build up an epic fight and then having save-or-suck rolls determine the outcome on turn 1, or having to rely on gimmicks like frequent immunities or constant rerolls (or let’s be honest, fudging the results), to try and create the right feeling for it, just undermines the narrative experience. Rather than get better with time and experience, I found as I played and DMed multiple sessions the very foundations of the system are poorly suited for a balanced experience. Some DMs seem to make it work for some tables (not by following the RAW of course), and that’s great. But I’m glad that there are other systems that offer what 5e doesn’t. Because as this video says, the rules do matter (even when they don’t). And being able to operate as a professional game designer and creating a complex but functional and well tuned system because WotC either doesn’t care or is too incompetent to do so, shouldn’t be a requirement for DMing.
i did not read through curse of strahd before we started playing, so i didn't know what kind of ableist shitshow it was gonna be, and even the parts that i had read ahead of time didn't register to me as being bad until we got to the encounter with the guy trying to drown a child in the lake, and my party (all of whom are disabled and mentally ill) were not amused when the entire explanation for his behavior was "well, the book says that he's insane, so..." after that i went through with a more critical eye and ended up removing a lot of stuff (most notably the entire abbey, which is now inhabited by a very nice lesbian vampire couple and absolutely no one else) i didn't know that i had to do that when we first started, and honestly i shouldn't have to do that. it should be the responsibility of the company that makes the product to make sure that their product isn't an ableist, racist, etc piece of garbage
Source material matters. It provides a spring-board for our ideas on what a world is going to look like. The challenge is that we have a game built on conflict; violence, theft, and worse. If we want to set up conflicts that feel like they matter then the story needs opponents and allies. The source material provides the basis for that. The problem begins to surface in how the source material does that. Even if one doesn't have the desire (or ability) to author complex moral structures around the conflicts we present our players. If our players are on the road and get jumped by bandits - it can be pretty cut and dry. Bandits are the baddies and we don't have to dive too deep in to why they've made poor life decisions. Or maybe the bard tries for a nat20 to seduce the bandit leader. But if they bandits are goblins then the trope is that these bandits were simply born that way - they are inherently baddies and should be killed as they can be nothing but baddies. If we see a goblin on the road - kill it before it attacks. That's where source material can do better. Me, myself... I set my goblins up with a social structure that rewards evil and aggression. Any goblin who doesn't adhere to that social structure is sent off on a fool's errand to die. Thus when the party finds a group of goblins... yeah... they're probably going to want to fight. But my party has also stumbled on a number of goblins who survived their tribes' attempts to kill them. They live quiet lives in a big city as a face in the crowds or isolated in small communities in the wilds. Source material does a better service when it presents intelligent beings as more complex. We can still look at most goblins being antagonistic. But we don't have to lean in to our own, real dark history of treating other people as fundamentally flawed at birth. Our games can be better for it.
I came to this expecting to disagree, but no, absolutely agree. The only thing I'd say is a concern is that if you're playing D&D, you should make people aware of what sorts of changes you're making, if you're hacking or houseruling the game. Obviously, on the fly little narrative cool things are just part of how DMing works, but I also think when you ask someone to play D&D, it's on you to make sure they understand if you're going to deviate from the written material in major ways. Hell, to some (like myself) it'll probably be a draw if you tell them that nobody in your game is evil because of genetics. :D
I've found a handy way to avoid rules tweaks becoming an issue is to have my players flat out tell me what interpretation of a rule their character requires to operate the way they want them to. At character creation, and each level up, they tell me what they chose, and how they want it to work. This allows me to not accidentally make a ruling that destroys their character build, and if they're misreading a rule (according to my interpretation) then they'll know in time to choose something else, or try to argue me into agreeing with them outside of the session where it won't hold everyone else up. It also gives me a good read on what my players are doing with their characters, and I can sometimes get some great extra story snippets out of it that might lead to a little bonus for them down the line.
To support your broader point about people not realising how much they can change - a very experienced RPGer of my acquaintance is developing a very negative attitude to 5e based on their experience as a player in Tyranny of Dragons - despite their experience they don't realise that it's a badly written adventure run by a DM who, from things I'm being told, is struggling with the system, adventure, or both. They just blame 5e and say it's "the worst".
Thank you! As someone whos been very invested in D&D becoming better, i genuinely hadn't even thought about the issues from the perspective of someone outside the hobby who might be interested.
4:49 Point of fact, too here... While I acknowledge how aspects of Hadozee, Drow, Orcs, and whatever else specific people take issue with...please understand that, *I* as NOT an American, do not inherently see the racism your folk do. Its not in our culture, and its not in our history. The idea that we should all adopt the American way of culture, history, and thinking is...well...imperialistic; and dare I say, maybe an unintended contamination from Paperclip? Then again, I may just be salty because the USA and CIA used PsyOps to affect a government change in my country, which resulted in us not being completely self-sufficient, and keeping our currency exchange well below yours... Hence why I have to pay $100 for a corebook for my hobby now. "Hmmm... groceries for a week, or a hobby book?" 14:10 But again, thats a very specifically American issue... I am not from America, my First Nation friends dont find that stuff racist... if anything, we tend to take issue with the Illithid; as a veiled, not-addressed, r**e-allegory... 'Cause, y'know, they have their tadpole violate your body, twist you into one of their own, and make you do they same thing to someone else...all the while using mental powers to manipulate people...oh, and literally have slaves... I understand your point, I do... because the rest of the world cant escape learning SOMETHING about America... But the issues you point out, wont be the same issues someone in France, Ireland, Italy, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Australia, or Japan will see...but we have our own, for sure.
The Example List in the beginning was a bit to long. I got it after 2-3 Examples, and it took a while from you to use these examples later on for an argument. I love your videos but at that point it was a bit.. exhausting to listen. All in all though a good video like always keep up the good work.
"Do DM understand how their changes effect the games balance" In my experience, No. Even for experienced DMs homebrew is largely a reactionary emotional choice without considering it's implications. One DM I played with loved their critical fumble table (which I only found out existed after rolling a 1 during the third season) I tried to talk and explain how it disproportionately hurt martials. Which was shut down with 'I was wrong' and "it's just fun flavor". Fast forward several sessions, we start combat and I go first. I attack twice hitting on the first and nat 1 the second. DM rolls a d100 for the table, it's a 97. I am then informed that my character is dead. From full health to dead in an instant, no death saves or anything. But not only am I dead, but the beast eviscerated me so completely that resurrection is not possible. "Cause dice need consequences". Turns out 95-100 is always permanent death in combat. By that point in the campaign I had rolled on that table 7 times, all the other players combined had rolled 3 times. Needless to say I didn't return to that group.
A one shot that I was apart of comes to mind in regards to this topic. I was once part of a one shot where everyone had, more or less, premade characters made by the DM beforehand, that way we could just hop right in and play (this was to take place during a party, so creating characters was out of the question). The only thing the players had input in is what kind of character they would like to play (race, class, alignment), so the DM could match up characters with people/play styles. Anyways, one player was playing a Chaotic Neutral character and he, unlike more than half of us, had not really experienced a REAL D&D campaign. So this guys kept acting out. Antagonizing players, being argumentative, a lot of "well, why CAN'T I do this? I thought I could do anything I want?" type attitude. Any time during the game we would bring up that he was being toxic and not fun, he would clap back with "well, I'm just playing my character!" This player truly did not understand the nuances of alignment and how to role play to be fun and he could not understand, even after multiple of us talking to him, why he wasn't fun to play with. This player relied way too heavily on alignment, and forgot to just have fun and go on a silly adventure. If players are not in the fandom, and seen/experienced all kinds of different play, the rules are the ONLY things these people have to go on to play. Even then, most people don't read the PHB cover to cover and might end up missing a crucial piece of information that helps in their game.
I'm jumping into the comments to explain, from one white dude who's had this explained to him to another, why specifically the removal of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs wasn't an overcorrection: When I asked an expat friend (who was not the only person I asked, but the only one who had the context to explain) whether he knew what the deal with that change was, he referred me to a pretty good bit of stand up from Trevor Noah about going to the US from South Africa for the first time and how uplifting, initially, it was for him that for the first time in his life, he was suddenly no longer 'half white for some and half black for others, but just black to everyone'. In lots of areas in the world people with mixed heritage are referred to obsessively based on how their heritage differs from the local majority. If you have a European parent and an African parent in most of Europe, you're 'half black' (or if it's North Africa 'half Moroccan' or 'half Egyptian' etc...). If you have a European parent and a Japanese parent, you're 'half European'. This is even true in the US for everyone who has a white parent and a non-white parent who is anything other than black. And while being constantly referred to by only the half of their heritage that the majority considers 'Other', all of these people face the full amount of racism that their non-majority parent faces while barely enjoying any of the privilege of their majority parent. And that kind of 'defined by their non-default heritage' language is also used for Half-Orcs and Half-Elves in D&D. Despite both also being half human, they are only ever referred to by the half of their heritage that 'Others' them. That's the absolutely understandable reason why WotC is considering getting rid of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs as distinct heritage options: People who already spend their entire life getting Othered as 'halfbreeds' and are, likely, playing a role playing game at least in part to get away from that, don't need to be confronted with a TTRPG system that codifies that exact kind of language in the very first step of character creation.
Best fix is ro simply keep everything, except the lore about the race and its characteristic bonus/minus, put those in a new section called setting and do a quick overview of: the lore in the forgotten realms and other setting with books to look at for more info, what that lore mean at character creation, for backgrounds and flavor, and what it does to the characteristic. That way you have a race that can be modified for any setting by simply adding or making lore for a setting. Maybe this race was conquered in X setting and lost Y characteristic but again another and in a different setting were the conqueror and gain Y instead of X. Setting Forgotten Realms : quick overview of lore (were conquered), stat +2 endurance -1 dexterity, book reference Eberon: Don't exist (make something for that campaign) Planescape: quick overview(were conqueror) +2 dexterity -1 constitution, reference.
A way that I've seen a couple times, that requires a fair bit of nuance to pull off and is really only possible either in homebrew or with dedicated "players' guides" products and "dm facing" products, is putting forward "lore" that's actually written from a specific in-universe point of view. It would be amazing and organic to have consumed the propaganda about an ancestry or faction, and then discover that it isn't true and that you've been misled diagetically for political ends. I think that would do a lot more to breed socially conscious stories than a 'kumbaya fantasy', where everyone gets along magically. Like, imagine if Wizards, instead of errataing out all the orc and goblin stuff from Volo's, developed and released an adventure where you come to realize that the orc and goblin camps in the adventure are resisting a deliberate campaign of relocation and extermination by a local duchy, backed by a splinter faction of a church. And that the church paid for a 'survey' of the region, written by Volo, and exacted editorial control over the writing of it. That would not only shut up the lore purists and leave the only objectors exposed as naked reactionaries, but would illustrate and even educate about how this kind of thing happens. The risk is that only the biased 'lore' would be player-facing, and you'd stumble right into bad-faith criticisms all the same...still, if it could be pulled off...
I think it's funny when people complain about Wizards changing things, like the Hadozee or races being inherently evil, with the "Just homebrew if you don't like it" defense. Because like... they could also just do that. If it's such a non-issue to home brew it, then just homebrew it instead of getting whipped into a mob. Some people's kids.
"If we fail to learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it. And if we ignore history completely; why then, we are just doomed." I don't know if this is stated verbatim, but it is one of the things that I think about with the cancel culture we see going on today. Simply removing or changing something because it brings up bad history is unwise. Education about it and why the history was bad will get us far further in life than removing or changing it. While I agree with your points, I think your conclusion is a little off the mark. Rather than making changes to the lore, WOTC and the D&D community should be attempting to use the lore to educate new players/DM's so that real life is moved forward rather than backward. At the same time, I think some people are overly sensitive to certain subjects, and in seeking to avoid or eradicate those subjects, actually further the damage done by those things. Hence, they are doomed. Talking about it to bring awareness or finger pointing isn't enough. Education is important, even if we don't like the subject being discussed.
Another argument about why it matters; *The ability to change a rule is good, but is NOT a substitute for a bad default.* It's the game designer's job to try and come up with a default ruleset for players- If they don't, they are not doing their job as a game designer. You genuinely *can't* build any game without defining default rules, and the ability for players to easily customise it afterwards doesn't change that. So, if part of a default ruleset is bad, customisation can only _lessen the damage_ but it's still the job of the game designer to intervene and fix the issue for the health of the game. A great example in a videogame I like to cite: Don't Starve Together had an optional rule for years called Disease, which was a mechanic the playerbase universally agreed was terrible and highly recommended turning off- But at that point, Disease's only purpose was to be a trap for new players trying to learn megabasing. Just because DST is so customisable, it didn't change the fact Disease was terrible and dragging the game down, so Klei chose to axe it from the game and reimagine the ideas they were originally trying to achieve with it. Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, DST is a worse game because Klei just said "turn it off in settings bruh" and used that to deflect criticism
At baseline, of course it doesn't "matter". But it matters as it pertains to the topic being discussed. "You can just..." is not an argument, it's a dismissal seeking to disengage from the discussion. "Trying to change things that really shouldn't ever have made it into the 2014 versions of the books." According to the people who take issue with them. "Especially as a Black player how do you think it feels..." I mean, that depends entirely on the person. Black people aren't a monolith. My sister, who is Black, and my friend who is from Trinidad, for example thought both of those issues were totally overblown and in no way identified the Drow as representing Black people. My sister actually found that concept kind of racist as the *only* similarity is they have dark skin, and occasionally some uncreative art. She had similar feelings around the upset regarding half-elves and half-orcs, in that being mixed she found them a fun way of exploring some of the concepts, while also being divorced from the reality because they were so exaggerated and fantastical. it's almost like the fantasy was a heightened exaggeration of real phenomena allowing her to explore it without having to actually directly engage with it. The difference between a subjective issue like those presented here, and a factual existential issue like climate change, is that the problem is situational. Presenting these problems as though they were intrinsically bad, when they obviously are not universally or factually accepted as being so, is that it perpetuates a false premise that those who do take issue with the subjective are correct, and those who do not are mistaken or acting in bad faith. People denying climate change, or perpetuating things that contribute to the issues bound up in it, are acting counter to facts. People who dig the Hadozee being a planet of the apes rip off are holding an opinion. Theirs isn't less valid because another segment of the audience interpreted the content differently and has a negative response to it. As opposed to if a mechanical aspect of the game, like say True Strike, basically does not work as intended. The issues around the Drow, Evil Ancestries, Hadozee, and potentially problematic content, are subjective. That doesn't mean that the audience opposed to them is wrong to feel the way they do, or that WoTC is wrong to alter their content to court a demographic of their audience, but them doing so does not mean the content *WAS* intrinsically problematic, just that they decided to cater to those who found it so. Much like how all those who believe that the game containing demons, or violence, or "false" deities, has a negative effect on the minds of those who play these games are entitled to their opinion, catering to that opinion would not mean it is true or even reflective of wide held beliefs instead of a vocal slice of the audience (even though that was what happened in the Satanic Panic, when TSR catered to that demographic. I mean you could use a lot of the same arguments, and you see the same kind of responses. They changed the names of demons and devils, but didn't really address the issues that audience had with them either. And that audience truly believed that content and the playing of the game was as tangibly harmful to the culture and wider community as members of the current community do some of the aspects of ancestry and some modern content). When we say things like "even when they're trying to be the good guys, there's no guarantee they're going to get it right." it takes a subjective opinion (there was a problem with races/ancestries/species as previously written) and treats it as a pass fail, right or wrong fact. Instead of a series of differing takes or interpretations that may or may not align. You can, and should, hold companies accountable to the degree that you are empowered to do so. But remember that when you do so you are essentially a lobbyist pushing your agenda, you are not inherently on the side of the angels because you are fighting what you think is the good fight, even if you win. And those companies are not inherently devils, even if they stick to their principles and do not alter their works according to your needs.
I totally get where you are coming from I started with 3.5 and just jumped in and built my own campaign and bumbled my way through it lots of rules went over my head. And some things that weren’t great happened. Luckily my friends went along with it and forgave me for those mistakes. The main reason I got through it was because of RUclipsrs who were putting out content and ideas to make games more fun and complex.
DMs have enough on their plate without having to fix the mistakes of the people who are supposed to be providing guidance. Not everyone is capable of creating effective homebrew and they shouldn't have to be. The whole point of buying the books is to have a guide to work from. If half that guide is useless because it's either badly designed or downright offensive, then WotC isn't doing their job right
12:09 As a black player, I literally don't relate to the drow because I'm not an elf. But on a serious note, I can understand some people see a PC species and identify with them, but I just... don't. They're an abstract concept of a living being that doesn't *actually* exist.
My biggest issues with the whole "just homebrew it" discussion is that nobody seems to undertsand that at a certain point you are no longer playing 5e. one or two changes and you're still playing 5e, but after you're ignoring core rules of the game or tossed out a sizable amount you're not playing 5e anymore. If you want to play 5e - Play buy the rules. If you want something other than the rules then play something else. Which brings me to my next point. Too many people chnage and homebrew 5e or greater D&D to the point that it is so janky and poorly functioning that they're better of playing another system. But far more often than no people play 5e with a bunch of really poor homebrew to make it into something else. It's just counter productive and results in a poorer game.
I've yet to play a full game of DnD but have made a lot of characters for sh*ts and giggles. My most recent is a goblin cleric named Tibbs. She's nature domain and has a pet sugar glider. I'm in the middle of watching the mighty nein so both Jester and Nott were a big inspiration. Tibbs is here to break the cultural expectations of her race by being kind and helping those in need
The current state of affairs at Wizards of the Coast, is what usually happens when a company started by creative people, is taken over by a corporation. When writing, designing and printing manuals, they are only concerned with cutting costs and increasing profits. They don't think about some twelve year old kid, who looks through their manuals, sitting on the shelf at Target, deciding whether or not they want to play.., I suspect if they do print manuals for the next edition, the books will be shrink wrapped.
My issue with homebrew is that where's the line for where honestly those people would be better off playing a different game and the culture of homebrew creates a negative community where people refuse to play anything other than D&D. D&D should be less popular, not because it's a bad game but because people should play more than just D&D.
The only thing dicey about this video was the transition to the outro! I keed, I keed. Thanks Mike, great video as always, appreciate you displaying your former wangrod self for all of us to learn from.
How could you do this to me...give us a discount code for Only Crits? I didn't neeeed more beautiful sparkle rocks for a game I never get to play in person but now I've ordered two more seeeets T_T
I liked this video and agree with most of what you said. I do think the tittle is a little misleading. This video isn’t really about rules at all. I’d love to hear you talk about why the written rules of the game, and the system you’re playing matters, which is what I thought this video was at first. Keep up the great work Mike.
i feel like this is a little like original content vs fan works like fanfiction: fanfic writers take whatever they want from the original material and change things to fit their own ideas. but nobody would say "you know what? the original creators are not responsible for creating their content with care, bc fans can overpower the canon with their own stuff anyway" - fans fixing things in fan works don't erase the fact that it would've been better to not have insensitive content in the canon in the first place. d&d just seems different at first bc ppl are actively invited to change things while works like tv shows or books are not meant to be as interactive. but in the end, wotc-content is also a frame of reference that will make an impact on ppl looking at it from the outside as well as fans, which means that it should be handled with care.
just popping in to say i thought it was incredibly funny that for me i got the "if you already have all the OnlyCrits dice you need, no you don't", and then it immediately cut to a mid-roll ad, it was just oddly funny timing
8:35 Better not tell them about the self-destruct mechanic I created for my kid's warforged because he thought it should exist. Not that he'll ever use it.
What a hilarious smooth slide to the sponsor. If I wouldn't have a dice embargo (wife: buy one more dice and you will eat it before you are allowed to eat me) I would totally buy some :)
This all day! When WOTC makes toxic content or even poor mechanics, they essentially force DMs to change things. This is absolute negligence in design. It is a design failure to create anything that MUST be changed either for balance , verisimilitude, or basic decency.
EXACTLY! Like what's been said, DMs have enough on their plate. It sucks that WOTC makes material that we need to significantly alter to make it a good safe fun time at the table, on top of running and planning everything
I can understand that people do not like a roll to check if the character suffers PTSD, and I would not do it that way. That is however not a good reason to call someone a bad GM/DM, since it is pretty much in line with the ableism based rules that D&D is built on. Which is why I have thrown out that whole paradigm that most games use at the core of the design in our hobby, and made my own system very different from that.
Though Critical Role actually did this with Caleb in Campaign 2, but it was an agreed-upon thing by Matt and Caleb's player Liam pre-game (and given how specifically the mechanics of it were defined, they probably discussed it for a while). Actually a Campagin 3 character had something similar.
Mike, I enjoyed the video, but as a heads up, “uppity” was a racist term invented to describe black people who were trying to get “up”, above their supposed station in society. Just FYI
The comment about the PTSD save baffles me. Because, knowing that player, this is almost certainly something they asked for when making their chatacter.
Love this topic. I am one of those 'keep the mechanics, but chuck some rules' GMs. The main thing for me, is: do my players at the table have an enriching, inversive experience, do they walk away with a pep in their step? As for the half-races being dropped, that is a thing that we voted to keep in our game - we have so many people of mixed heritage around us, that it seems almost insane to us that that is even a thing that WotC chose to do. Heck, I run a game where I teach, and I have 30 % mixed race kids. They were STOKED to see the half-elves and -orcs. But then, I also run races as individuals, not generic masses who submits to a stereotype. I love that you are so very aware of what you do and that you are willing to re-evaluate and openly discuss your previous faux-pas, it makes you immensely relatable. We had a chat about it this Saturday while we had our supper break, and my players laughed at me when I said I'd run away if we had a rules lawyer, because they'd CONSTANTLY shred my decisions. Know your rules, so you know how to break them responsibly, and be open about it. That is what I walked away with from that conversation. Gods, I love my players.
"As for the half-races being dropped, that is a thing that we voted to keep in our game - we have so many people of mixed heritage around us, that it seems almost insane to us that that is even a thing that WotC chose to do." Ok, but they didn't drop half races. That's just what the headlines intended to generate rage clicks say. It's just no longer limited to only elves/orcs/humans. Half-elves and half-orcs aren't considered as a separate race than their parents, but are included in it. Now people can choose to be half gnome, half tabaxi, half anything else, and choose how their heritage shows up for them. In fact, for your kids it's even better, as they can now choose parentage that represents them even more closely. And I say this as someone who is part of cultural group legally referred to as halfbreeds up until a couple decades ago.
7:13 yeah, can you imagine a world where bisexual genderfluid people exist in the first place? Let alone one where such atypical gender characteristics would be pushed to places like the circus..!
Lol I know, the way I phrased it kind of implies that a character like Molly is somehow a more ridiculous concept than PTSD, but ultimately my point was that a character like Molly pretty clearly indicates that the cast was using the game to represent a broader sampling of the human experience. So the idea that Matt might introduce a homebrew rule to represent one of those characters’ experiences shouldn’t be surprising if that commenter had been paying attention to what the group was actually doing in Campaign 2.
Ah, this is even more fundamental of a video than the old 'system matters' stuff (yes, you can houserule. No, that doesn't mean you or that you're homebrew D&D 5e game to play a campaign inspired by Watership Down will work as well as either designing your own system to do that with, or using one of the existing systems clearly inspired by Watership Down (I know of two - Bunnies & Burrows and The Warren. And since the design ethos of both are vastly different, which of those you go with also matters, since the play experience of an 80s old school game is vastly different from a PbtA designed around generational play). Houseruling is inevitable, at least outside of one-page games. Players are weird (I'm including myself in this), humans are fallible (I completely forgot to give my dinos gimmicks when running Escape from Dino Island recently, and that's not even particularly complicated a game - Accidental houserules are absolutely a thing), and what works for your table isn't going to work at someone else's, but picking the right game as your base to houserule from definitely helps. I try and only pipe in with rules when I'm not running if the GM is asking for input (and/or after the game when discussing the on the fly ruling when that happens). The PTSD rolls feels like it might be borrowing from GURPS and how that game handles mental disadvantages, though I suppose it could also come from Pathfinder's flat check concept and how some status effects require making one in order to successfully do the thing you're trying to do. (and that's another thing - The more systems you've played, the wider your palette to borrow from for houseruling rather than having to invent things on the fly. Which means that someone who's just running D&D for the first time has less of a toolbox with which to houserule D&D than someone who's played and/or ran - or at least read and/or watched a bunch of different systems) While he's primarily a board game designer, Gil Hova's article on 'invisible ropes' - Sadly seemingly only available on the internet archive at this point - feels vastly relevant here to the lore stuff, but also just the general principle that it's generally not a great idea to houserule things until you know what the system is actually doing unless something comes up that the system isn't accounting for (at least, houseruling none-lore things), which does make 5e's 'ask the GM' approach to design a problem for getting people into the hobby.
As a DM with a heavy emphasis on lore in my games, I've been feeling very burned out with Wizards of the Coast for a while now. I homebrew a good amount of stuff for my homebrew world, but that doesn't mean I want to or should build everything from scratch. Between family and full time job, I don't always have time to come up with all that lore - it takes a lot of effort! It helps immensely when I at least have a decent starting-off point for lore, such as in the case with older races. Lately I've found that WotC have gotten lazy, giving very limited lore or lore that feels like a throw-away (really, Giff's whole thing is they fight over how to say their name? Really??). Reminder that I, as many other DMs, pay money for this, and fairly decent money at that. I don't think it's too much to expect some actual substance for our money.
Anything that doesn't effect balance I heavily endorse changing in a setting. Crossbows are now guns? Neat! There's a kingdom of gnolls, and they're the leading wizards of our era? Fantastic. Race is renamed to culture, and you can be as mixed race or uncommon as you like, as long as you abide by one stat block? Yes please. Let me play the Orc baby that got lost at see, and raised by tritons in their underwater kingdom. I'll use the simic hybrid stats to best fit the RP. Maybe they crafted me some sort of tools as I grew up or had some magic plant they used for outsiders. I do try my best to stay within the official rules when it comes to mechanical balance, like homebrewing 'fixes' to ranger or monk, purely to avoid making additional work for the GM to vet or balance around, especially for fear of the snowball effect. I only worry about myself in that regard though, if a change helps another player have fun, please go for it, and the DM is welcome to bring any personal rules to the table they like.
I think what really helped me, with my 40+ years of playing the game, accept that the published rules need to be better is putting myself in the shoes of a new DM. You're right, in that a brand new player/DM doesn't have the experience to figure out how to tweak or adjust rules. Also, as you and others have said, the publisher needs to establish a better baseline of rules, and not rely on the community to make the adjustments at their tables.
I openly admit I haven't watched the vid yet but, based on the taglines, and having 40 years experience playing, and 30+ years of DM'ing D&D, I immediately think the exact opposite is true. If anything matters, it's homebrewing, then rules, then everything else...
Theres also another thing which is that often some maybe somewhat niche aspect of the lore that I as a dm may not like, unless it happens to come up in the game, that change may never get noticed by my players, so they may have some preconceptions that its as written and that may cause some issues. Such as for my new dragon heist campaign one of my players made a tiefling who was abandoned at birth at a monk temple of oghma and raised there, I didnt fully ask them but I assumed their reasoning for this was at least partly, tiefling racism being a big thing in the lore, but I dont like tiefling racism and generally ignore it (not major but still notable dragon heist spoilers ahead marked where they end) I got lucky and remembered the devilish cult among some of the waterdavian nobles that is a big player in the conflict and so I approached them to ask if they would like if their character came from "a cult of asmodeus spread across some of the nobles" so at least that way we were on the same page as I find that the only form of tiefling suppression/oppression thats interesting is more framed on strained/conflicting parental bonds from parents who try to hide their devilish ties that their own child is evidence of. WATERDEEP SPOILERS OVER (Also similarly are the drow which I mostly just changed by a couple things, the drow arent some evil monolith through just lolth bad lmao, the underdark as a whole is a harsh meritocracy with heavy religious bias to lolth, many drow are cast out for not conforming, and can be found all across the world, including some towns where they are a very common sight and just, a part of the culture, but that probably wouldnt be assumed by the average player unless it comes up.)
My viewpoint is that I am willing to make changes to support decisions made by my table. If I have a player who wants to play a character with PTSD I will ask do they want mechanical support that I will create or do they just want to roleplay it. Any mechanic can change and I usually create my own world. However, I am one man. I don't always have time to look through every race and class so when a player finds one they like we usually go with the general and adapt specifics to the world. Which means the lore as written by the publishing company is usually a players first impression of your game whether you are using it or not. When it comes to mechanics, yes, I can homebrew things, but this takes time and if I paid a company a sizeable amount of money I expect that to be saving time by using their rules. It gets to a point where i may as well not have bothered and given a different publisher my money.
I think the key difference is whether the argument is being made to empower GMs to do whatever they want at their tables (which is a good thing), versus whether the argument is being made in order to absolve the publishers of any responsibility (which I find to be far less helpful).
What’s the biggest change you’ve made to an RPG product that you wish the publisher had taken care of instead?
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My only critisism of this video is that it felt more aimed at the content around lore and flavour rather than rules, for myself, rules are important as a neurodivergent person as it sets a baseline of what to work towards/expect, and then after that going by the addage that "to break the rules you must know how they work" dnd and other games i think rules matter because it allows all players to have a chacne to come to any game with a base understnading of what theyre getting into. Regardless, your points are correct i just dont think they fully match the video i was expecting, i look forward to your next video :)
As a nerodivegent person I like rules but only if they make sense to me, I've notice others who like rules are, people who like security and Consistency those who don't like rules feel trapped and confined.
Yes this wasn't at all about rules
This was a response video to the notion that orcs must be evil or not.
1. Mike puts out a video saying many people see old school orcs as evil.
2. Commenters say they will run orcs how they want (either positive or negative).
3. Mike is responding to these comments.
This is why it's more of a flavor discussion rather than hard rules discussion.
@@MySqueezingArm I've never understood this "old school orcs are evil" thing.
I've been playing since the black box and Champions of Mystara and I never ran into "the rules say these are evil so they're all genetically evil" until the 2020s. Not even once, in over 30 years of playing with different groups and at conventions, not until the post-Mordenkainen's alignment kerfuffle.
Gruumsh isn't even old school, he's a Deities and Demigods addition after the Satanic panic, and doesn't become the Gruumsh we know as cartoonish evil until the 3.0 release of Forgotten Realms. Orcs as elementally evil is a WotC thing. For TSR, the full description was "Ugly, bad-tempered, animalistic humanoids who live underground and are active at night. Sadistic bullies who hate other living creatures and delight in killing." for years -- obviously not good guys but nowhere near the "Tribe of he who watches" level cartoon caricatures of evil they created for 5E.
@@josephcarriveau9691 You can run them however you want. I grew up playing AD&D and 3.5. Our Orcs were effectively Urakai from Lord of the Rings. More or less evil demon things.
I don't get why other people who play this way feel the need to correct others. Having the default be 'They're a different culture, respect it' seems good to me.
I got into DM'ing from seeing Adventuring Party clips featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan encouraging people to DM, and noting the DM's ability and responsibility to put their own spin on things & help it be a good time at the table 👍 Changing rules and winging it is in my blood...
...AND! Mike's take on this is EXTREMELY GOOD. I ran a game on the Plane of Fire, and all the official WOTC lore says the main city there is extremely defined by its slavery. It was a lot of prep work to overhaul the main conceit of THE major hub of this game!!! A lot of the official D&D content either doesn't fit my game, or is actively repelling to my players.
I don't mind doing the work, because I love my table. But I wish it wasn't so necessary so often. Great video, it really made me think.
My take on homebrewing is to use it sparingly, and stick as closely to RAW as possible. With that said, that's my take. It has no bearing on how someone else decides to run their games.
First and Foremost: IT IS A GAME! If you as a player want to model a politically correct modern world, you will definitely be unhappy at my table. If you are offended by the publisher's content, please remember that,(a) it is fantasy which is NOT designed to reflect reality at any point ( your subterranean born, black skinned, dark elf mage, who worships the Spider Queen , and is feared and discriminated against, reflects REALITY? REALLY?) (b) is there for people to have FUN (and discussing whether or not this is in the "rule" book or having an argument over whether or not the rules allow XXXX, is NOT fun for anyone. I got into gaming way back in AD&D2e days, went thru the arguments weekly, and hunted around for something better - and found GURPS by Steve Jackson Games. So, I, and the core group of players switched in the early 80s, and have been playing GURPS 3eRevised ever since. GURPS is NOT perfect, but we extremely seldom have rules issues, and since ALL of us have GM'd at one point or another, we feel comfortable discussing rules that have issues, and agreeing to changes. And the emphasis is that ALL the "rules" are optional; and we don't worry about game "balance" other than making sure everyone has their PC participating during the game session.
I’m sorry to hear that you feel a “politically correct” game is antithetical to your idea of a fun time with your friends. I truly can’t understand taking pride in the idea that your game would be alienating to people who just want the world to be better for everyone, and who just want everyone to express a bit of compassion and empathy toward others. If you were to ask me, that just seems like a really sad hill to die on.
Regardless, I do hope you have a wonderful day.
The biggest reason why what WotC does matters is that as the commonly distributed common reference, they set the baseline that everyone has to decide whether to abide by or diverge from. Even if you decide to change it, the fact that it was there and that you had to react to it means that it's in your head and you have to handle it SOMEHOW.
A friend of mine played her Tiefling Warlock as a victim of extreme prejudice for a three-year campaign, despite no such prejudice existing in our DM's world. Those first impressions from two sentences in the PHB really cemented that idea in her head, even to this day.
There are people in the real world who act like victims of extreme prejudice, even when no such prejudice exists. I would have used this as an opportunity to give the character opportunity to see and recognize that no such prejudice exists.
Not the video I expected, but still solid. Based on the title, I thought it was going to be more about game balancing, like how bending one rule here or there warps other rules. My favorite example of this is how I don't like flanking advantage because on the surface it looks fun, but it makes something that is supposed to be rare almost trivial to achieve, giving up niche protection. Like how an Oath of Vengeance Paladin is supposed to have to spend one of their precious once per short rest Channel Divinities to gain advantage on one target in the combat, but instead if they have one melee buddy, they can position each other to get advantage on whoever they want.
Honestly that's what I cam on expecting too. It was still a good video just not what I thought the title was gonna speak about
Hey Mike, great video.
Personally, I wish you spent more time talking about... I think two topics. I actually really WANT to talk about these topics.
One, about Lore being a total experience. If its bad lore, it should be changed or disposed of. Its a great experience for players to show up feeling like they are ready to dive into a universe they know, and its WOTCs responsibility to deliver on that. This doesn't effect me that much, because I have my own setting, with my own lore, etc. But I think its important.
Two, on how GMs have enough on their plate to now try and generate new mechanics or revise old ones. I am trying to run this adventure already. Coming up with well-thought out, fun-to-use, and balanced mechanics that normally require years of playtesting on top of that? No way!
You could even apply this to the Hadozee discussion. I am not qualified (I know I am not) to make a properly sensitive and yet engaging piece of lore for the Hadozee while also doing these other things. I bought spelljammer! I expect the person I paid to make my ttrpg rules to take these things into account.
TBH, I’ve always hated the “just homebrew it” defense of something because it always feels like someone trying to deflect an issue rather than actually discuss it. Spelljammer is the biggest offender of this IMO, both for the Hadozee situation and for the rules in the book. While yes I could “just homebrew it”, that doesn’t excuse the fact that WotC made something that doesn’t work, and should be pointed out as such.
I also feel like this is an argument that puts an unfair amount of work on DMs. DMs already have a ton on their plate normally, and part of the point of using WotC materials is that you don’t have to come up with stuff yourself. If you need to completely rewrite a section of a module because it’s poorly made, or if you need to rework a monster that was supposedly on-CR for your party, then you’re effectively having to do the designers job for them. While I understand that DMs will always have to make stuff up on the fly, and no module or monster can account for every single party, I also think that DMs shouldn’t have to remake the adventure by themselves if they don’t want to just because it’s poorly designed.
Great video, I think you really hit the nail on the head on why this argument is a flawed response to criticism.
Had this feeling when I ran Descent Into Avernus game and realized why so many people said to skip to Chapter 2 of the book as the opening is a broken, impossible challenge for a group of 6 level 1 characters, let alone the three players I had. It shouldn't be my responsibility to completely fix every encounter or look through the monster manual to replace creatures to provide a fighting chance.
Absolutely.
While homebrewing is significantly less work than modding in a videogame, like with modding, the ability to homebrew something doesn't excuse products where you pretty much have to homebrew stuff (outside of the normal "And then my players decided to do something the rules had no reasonable way of accounting for it so I had to homebrew it on the fly/were interested in exploring something that doesn't quite fit the expected tone of the game so we worked out homebrew for that" style stuff that any game with a simulationist approach is going to wind up encountering because you can't think of everything)
This isn't really about rules is it? You're speaking about setting lore. Which doesn't invalidate your points at all, I just wish the video's title matched.
All the same, the bit you said about changing rules was helpful to me. I love to write up settings, and I'm comfortable with changing lore and even rules to suit the campaign. (Two examples. I once wrote a setting where elves tend to be happy-go-lucky because they know they'll just reincarnate if they die . . . the elven cycle makes it easy not to sweat the small stuff. I also eliminated the Crossbow Expert feat because D&D crossbows already reload impossibly fast without going full Hawk the Slayer.) However, any time a game goes wrong my mind leaps to "maybe it's gone wrong because I changed the rules." It's silly, and hearing you say out loud that we're expected to use our judgement and change things for our games helps to counter that instinct. So, thanks for that!
This was a great video that touches on a serious topic that has a title that does not match the majority of the content.
Guilty as charged lol
@SupergeekMike It happens lol
“Dicey subject” = perfect line 🙌
I recently had a Lich encounter in my campaign. Ever since the early 1980's in AD&D, the reliquary where a Lich hides their soul has been referred to as a "phylactery". This references a real world item that Orthodox Jews like myself use every morning during prayer. In earlier editions of the game there were magical phylacteries that could be used by good aligned player characters, like the Phylactery of Faithfulness. Also the description of this item as used by the Lich was vaguer. Around the time of 3.X Wizards of the Coast changed the description of the item in the Monster Manual to more closely describe the holy items I have sitting in a velvet bag two feet away from where I'm sitting as I type this. This has bothered a lot of people, Jewish and non-Jewish for some time, so much so that Paizo and EN Publishing have both renamed this item to a "soul cage" or "soul vessel" to avoid harm. In my encounter with the Lich I had a Mimir, a skull-like item that records and retells lore point out to my players' characters in universe not to call this item a "phylactery". However the use of "phylactery" in WotC products is so ingrained, that even I found my self slipping up, even though I wanted to call the stupid thing a "soul vessel". This should show people how when Wizards of the Coast uses a term in a questionably antisemitic way, the fact that they have used it for decades (and TSR did so before them) makes it difficult to show players a new way forward.
Speaking of antisemitic things TSR published that Wizards of the Coast republished unquestioningly within the last sixteen years, in module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits, a group of evil elves (not Drow, just evil high elves) are referred to as "Pharisees". These elves are described as "hypocrites" for some reason, and they are secretly in league with Lolth. For those who don't know, the Pharisees were a derogatory term for the Rabbis of the 1st century CE, which was recorded in the Christian Bible for posterity. This use of "Pharisee" in Q1 is blatantly antisemitic, and TSR of course reprinted Q1 in GDQ1-7 Queen of Spiders unchanged. Fast forward to the late 2000's, and Wizards of the Coast prints Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, a reimagining of Queen of Spiders for 3.5. I bought Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which of course is steeped in the racism related to the Drow. It also reprints the reference to the "Pharisee" elves unchanged. Way to go Wizards of the Coast. It doesn't seem likely that WotC will release another adventure that features these elves or their connection to Lolth, but one never knows. After all, Liches still have their "phylacteries" in D&D 5E.
Post watch thoughts: Well, I respectfully still have to disagree. From OD&D, through AD&D 1st and 2nd and beyond, I have never encountered anything I would consider "bad". Silly, yes. Bad, nope. I guess I'd have to chalk this up to a generational aspect. And as far as RAW goes, I'll age myself again and refer to the most important line in the 2E DMG: make it up. Rules for action resolution are critical for the game, but beyond that, the DM is supposed to administrate.
While I do not disagree about the Hadozee example specifically, I think a lot of the discussion is due to a mismatch of what the content actually is trying to do. A novel, TV show or movie will set up an antagonist, drama will occur, and then the protagonists win in the end. A D&D book aimed at dungeon masters (such as Spelljammer or Fizbans) can really only do the first part, leaving a non-DM reader with unresolved antagonists, something that is unique to this medium. It is up to each individual play table to then take this conflict and resolve it, something that for a vast majority of tables happens in private. This is why I have less of a problem with books that say "here are some creatures that we have designed as explicitly evil antagonists". While we wish every DM would only run Game of Thrones-style grey villains with deep backstories, sometimes you need goblins to kidnap the blacksmith's kids, and talking won't get the party very far in trying to free them.
I 100% agree with this to the extent that these villains can still be a mixed bag of offensiveness to some players. This is where I think it's up to DM's to showcase nuance with even the kidnapping goblins, as maybe there are ways to humanize otherwise villainous behavior.
The really interesting part of your thought is that it touches on the big issue of races/ancestries/alien species/whatever: there is a huge difference between "characters with a role in this story" and an entire civilization, or a whole class of living being. It's not okay to describe all Japanese people of the 18th Century as obsessing over swords or running around in black masks throwing shuriken at samurai. It would be appropriate to write samurai characters in a jidai geki story, though, and hooded ninja with trick weapons work in a fantastical version of feudal Japan. Similarly, it's fine to describe an orc's size, speed, higher physical compared to humans, and the like. Describing them as having a limited range of alignments paints them as not-people, though, and as for the business of official books saying that half-orcs usually exist because of . . . well, let's say "raiding of human territory" . . . forces the audience to see orcs in every game as nothing but monsters, which limits their potential as characters horribly.
It would be fine to say "in this adventure the party encounter a raiding band of goblins." It's different to have the official books only describe goblins as raiders who can't understand the cultures of the playable races. Especially when, as of Volo's Guide, goblins _are_ a playable race.
It’s fine to slaughter the human bandits, and it’s fine to slaughter the orc bandits. It’s not OK to say all orcs are bandits any more than it would be to say that all humans are bandits. What role an individual plays in the story should be solely determined by their ancestry.
@@fakjbf3129 Sorry, just checking -- did you mean their role "should _not_ be solely determined by their ancestry"? That's what you seemed to be saying -- kill 'em because they're vicious bandits, not because they're humans/orcs.
@@SingularityOrbit yep, an unfortunate typo
I completely agree. This may have been before you started playing TTRPGs, but there was a time when Metaplot was a "Big thing" in certain game lines, where each sourcebook advanced the overall plotline slightly. And for people like me, who weren't fond of metaplot to say the least, we kept being told "you don't have to follow it" but ... each book changed the world slightly, and as they diverged from how my game had developed and the choices I'd made earlier because the relevant book hadn't been published yet, each supliment became less and less useful to me, even for the mechanics because a lot of these games had their mechanics and worlds tied very closely together. Meaning I had to spend more time hacking out homebrew worlds than settings or adventures... and homebrewing mechanics is not my happy fun place when building a game, so they're not my strong suit.
Fortunately, most of the companies that supported metaplot have learned better how to divorce it from mechanics, or stopped doing it all together. So I'm only hacking rules when the rules actually don't work, and not when they're simply not a good fit for where my table wants to go.
(And that's not even getting into the mess of having the L5R card game tournaments determine the storyline for the L5R TTRPG back when both were owned by AEG. The fiction that produced was awesome, but it made a mess of the world for anyone who didn't care about the card game.)
One thing that I would like to mention is a slightly different perspective. As a rules person who tends to run by Rules as Written... I do not care one whit about how other people run their games.
However, when people lobby for a change to the rules of the game, they are lobbying for changes that will change MY game. Because of this... I don't get to ignore those changes. I am going to have people showing up at MY table with new rules, expecting that I will now be bound by them, whether I like it or not. So I have every reason to care about any changes, updates, or modifications of the rules.
In addition, if a new player joins one game where everything is Homebrewed... and then wants to join a new group (Maybe they moved) and they wind up at my table...they are likely to be confused and possibly even angry when they suddenly cannot enjoy the Homebrew rules that they are used to. I have seen this happen when someone showed up at a table I was playing at and wanted us to homebrew a overpowered, nonexistent race/ species, and the DM refused. The the player retorted with, "My old DM would have allowed it, because he was OK with us playing anything we could imagine. Isn't this the game where you can play a werewolf?", and she was almost outraged when we advised her that is a player became a werewolf or Vampire and could not be cured, that those creatures were not allowed to be played, and that such characters would be removed from play. She never returned...I don't know if she ever played again.
We do not have to care how others play to care very much about how new rules affect OUR play.
This doesn't really add anything to the real conversation, but your transition to the sponsor made me laugh out loud. Good job.
My favorite part of the sponsor was the ending "if you have enough, you don't" because obviously you can never have enough cool/pretty/shiny things!
@@SLorraineEexactly! I have been GMing and playing since the late 70s, I have plenty of dice, enough to do what I need to do, but recently for my birthday two of my nieces, aged 11 and 13, gave me a set of shiny swirly dice that are prettier than any other dice I own and I love it!
My brother ran a one-shot for them, his wife, and myself while I was visiting - the girls played a pair of Tabaxi rogues who were twins nicknamed Double and Trouble. (My shiny new dice served my cleric/warlock well.) My brother and sister-in-law are clearly raising their young adventurers properly. ❤
While you're correct for all of this I like to add a more down to earth argument about why wotc has a responsibility to put out good content: they're selling it. And I don't know the price in America but a dnd physical book here is at least 45 euros, which is quite expensive. If I buy an official adventure book from wotc I should be able to run a good game, and not throw half of it away because it's imbalanced, or too rail roady.
Absolutely. I don't want to pay a fair bit of money only to have to redo a bunch of it! We paid for a playable adventure, and should receive a playable adventure that doesn't NEED a bunch of homebrew revisions to make it playable.
Good video. The one thought I want to share is that I actually agree with W OTC’s decision to get rid of the half Orc. I’ve always felt that the half Orc as it is functions as a way for players to play an Orc character, but “ one of the good ones” which is problematic when the main difference is their mixed genetic make up, specifically the half human part, explicitly determines the character’s intelligence and their potential to be good as opposed to the savage unredeemable full blooded Orc. This is despite the fact that the lore establishes that half Orcs of many kinds (what we call half Orc, Orogs etc. ) are accepted as Orcs within Orc societies and are typically seen and treated like other Orcs by humans. I don’t want to go too deep into why this is problematic, but I hope you can see why. I don’t have the same issues with half elves, but the issue would come up again with an half elf drow character to a lesser extent. I have no problem with a player being a mixed character, but when the rules tie their genetic background to the content of their character, that is an issue for me. I want the player to come up with a reason in the character’s upbringing and experience to inform their motivation and alignment for lack of a better term.
Also, I didn’t want to bring this up before, but using the word heritages instead of races isn’t as racially neutral as you seem to think if either term is used to determine their personality by default. To say that a character isn’t a certain way because of their race, but because of their “heritage” just puts a label of prejudice that people who have not experienced prejudice and racism and don’t identify their own race and an integral aspect of their heritage.
I don’t want to pile on here. You do great vids and I respect your opinions even when I don’t agree. Just sharing my perspective.
Who, after two seconds of reading or only one session of play, thinks "this entire genre of game isn't for me"? that's like saying "i didn't like family guy so the Simpsons and rick and Morty must also suck" or "I didnt like go fish so i wont like poker either"
to me that way of thinking seems unacceptable and i do not understand how someone could come to that conclusion especially in the case of D&D where the whole point is that every game is unique. anyone with that mind set has missed what is so good about not only D&D but all TTRPGs and if it does exist it needs to be addressed
Simply put, there's so much entertainment out there in direct competition. If you're asking the players to get invested enough to learn all the rules, and committed enough to meet every week, AND then the players see something that makes them question if this is the right game for them, then that can spook them away.
I only played a Soulsborne game for 20min before feeling it wasn't my type of game. When Elden Ring came out, my friends talked it up in a way that made me think I ought to give the series a second chance. But now it's 50th in line behind a bunch of other hobbies and commitments.
And if they've played for a couple of months of weekly sessions, and the DM is playing the game as it's written, and the material is still making that player uncomfortable, and the DM is running their first TTRPG and hasn't been taught about safety tools because they don't exist in WotC books . . . then it hasn't been two seconds or only one session. People can be new to things and not have the experience necessary to make necessary changes. It happens all the time. Telling someone in a little town that, if they don't like their friend's game, or the only game being run by some guy in town, that they should know how to find a game that's closer to what they want, when they've already had a bad experience, is missing the problem. As with everything else in life, you only get one chance to make a first impression. If the game hits someone wrong because of the world created in its core books, then that's all it takes to send them off to do something else with their time instead.
@@SingularityOrbit That's not my argument. If you tried dnd for a while and decided you don't like it, i couldn't care less, but the idea that someone gave up TTRPGs after seeing DnD at it's worst is Insane and those people need to be less volatile with their judgment.
I firmly believe that everyone can find a ttrpg they enjoy, but thats a different point than the one i originally brought up
@@antimonyparanoia People don't give up on things they aren't enjoying because they've tried absolutely everything it has to offer, but because they've encountered something about it that makes them not enjoy it. Nobody other than that person gets to make that decision. If the roleplaying experience is bad _for any reason_ then that person had a bad experience -- but if it was bad because of something in the offiical text of the game then there's no reason for them to believe it's going to get better.
Love that last point. What a lot of people that look like us either don't understand or don't care about is that while yes, you can change things at your table, that doesn't change the fact that [insert Thing In Question] is still doing harm. And unless someone grew up in the community that was harmed, most of us are never taught or exposed to the history we'd need to know to understand why certain things are harmful and how those harms persist into present systems.
If the lore doesn’t matter then don’t get mad when people change it to something they prefer. If the lore does matter then it’s up to the designers to be responsible about what kinds of stuff they put in the lore. But internet trolls want it both ways, they say to not get upset at the developer about problematic lore because it doesn’t really matter but also insist that changing the lore fundamentally breaks the game.
It's good to acknowledge when we're being helpful and when we're being wangrods (#MCDM) but I would love to hear more about the mechanical implications and advice for changing rules than a brief history of lore missteps in D&D. Matt Colville is really good at just workshopping an idea for a mechanic on camera, and I think we all love to get other perspectives of DM's, like how do you approach fulfilling a fantasy of a concept with new mechanical rules, how do you approach balance, and do you have an opinion for what kinds of new/altered rules make for more "fun"?
Exactly! The fact twilight cleric exists means homebrew balance is BEYOND broken. Using official material as the baseline makes less than no sense now since it gives you a license for literally anything you can think of and you can justify it by saying "well WotC made twilight cleric and it's more powerful than this!"
The fact initiative is so terrible means people are using it as a baseline and trying to shift the EXISTING system... Because it's already there. Even if it's a bad one, it's still "easier" than making a new one.
The fact existing lore is pretty racist and is built on harmful stereotypes created in the 1980s by old white guys means it's OUR responsibility to change it. The racism, just as in the real world with existing institutions, *is the baseline* and anyone who has an issue with it has to change it, basically do their job for them. Or people who don't realise it get harmful stereotypes reinforced subconsciously.
Basically the baseline matters. A house on bad foundations cannot stand.
02:23 Tyranny of Dragons is really two modules that you can run back to back.
The first, Hoard of the Dragon Queen, is a true railroad (well very largely unless an experienced DM changes it) but it was the first module published for 5e (written even before the rules were finalised) and is intended to introduce DMs and Players into the game so it needs to be a fairly restrictive in the choices offered in order to allow people to get the rules under their belt. It's a social contract that if you sit down to play a WotC campaign book it's going to be somewhat linear in nature - as would any campaign with a defined beginning, middle, and end. (IMO, the worst part of HotDQ is "The Road" that a DM really needs to be a little inventive with to prevent it stodging down.)
If the DM allows the players to do whatever they want, they can quickly de-rail the story. For example, one time I ran it, the player characters killed off an important NPC so that they could steal a valuable gem that he was offering them to go and do a tracking mission for him. Rather than taking the deal, they just slew him on the spot, and went on the run doing dastardly deeds until they could be coralled back into the main plot.
The second module, Rise of Tiamat, is a much looser format with set piece scenarios that the DM can stitch together woven in with their own content now that they've go some more experience with running the game. There are also sort of intermission points where their progress against the overall objective can be measured (showing DMs how to provide some sense of structure into a more free-form set of adventures). It's not bad, not great, but not bad. But DMs have to be prepared to put work into preparing it rather than just running straight through like you can, but probably shouldn't, with HotDQ.
It's easy enough to run RoT alongside something like Princes of the Apocalypse which gives a sort of richer background that that the characters can operate against. You can use PotA in this way for Storm King's Thunder too.
"You can just homebrew it!"
Then why the f*ck am I paying these people for? I could also just make my own game. But we pay for someone else to do that labor, and if they don't deliver on that - yes, you should probably go buy a game that delivers better for you.
This video is amazing. It's really awesome to have this in my toolkit now to show folks when I can't articulate my thoughts on this topic. People seem to always seem to assume when I'm critical of DnD, I'm critical of their game at their table instead of ... the major publications put in front of countless folks with little consideration of the consequences of whats written in them. I heard the "well you can just change it" argument all throughout college at my RPG club and I hated it, so this was super cathartic.
Balance is very important to me because danger and risk and consequence are important narrative devices. I think where 5e as written continuously fails is in its gameplay balance. There is very poor balance between classes, between monsters, and between encounters. Trying to build up an epic fight and then having save-or-suck rolls determine the outcome on turn 1, or having to rely on gimmicks like frequent immunities or constant rerolls (or let’s be honest, fudging the results), to try and create the right feeling for it, just undermines the narrative experience. Rather than get better with time and experience, I found as I played and DMed multiple sessions the very foundations of the system are poorly suited for a balanced experience. Some DMs seem to make it work for some tables (not by following the RAW of course), and that’s great. But I’m glad that there are other systems that offer what 5e doesn’t. Because as this video says, the rules do matter (even when they don’t). And being able to operate as a professional game designer and creating a complex but functional and well tuned system because WotC either doesn’t care or is too incompetent to do so, shouldn’t be a requirement for DMing.
i did not read through curse of strahd before we started playing, so i didn't know what kind of ableist shitshow it was gonna be, and even the parts that i had read ahead of time didn't register to me as being bad
until we got to the encounter with the guy trying to drown a child in the lake, and my party (all of whom are disabled and mentally ill) were not amused when the entire explanation for his behavior was "well, the book says that he's insane, so..."
after that i went through with a more critical eye and ended up removing a lot of stuff (most notably the entire abbey, which is now inhabited by a very nice lesbian vampire couple and absolutely no one else)
i didn't know that i had to do that when we first started, and honestly i shouldn't have to do that. it should be the responsibility of the company that makes the product to make sure that their product isn't an ableist, racist, etc piece of garbage
“Who cares if this recipe for cookies (that you paid for) is missing important ingredients just modify the recipe yourself”
Source material matters. It provides a spring-board for our ideas on what a world is going to look like. The challenge is that we have a game built on conflict; violence, theft, and worse. If we want to set up conflicts that feel like they matter then the story needs opponents and allies. The source material provides the basis for that.
The problem begins to surface in how the source material does that. Even if one doesn't have the desire (or ability) to author complex moral structures around the conflicts we present our players. If our players are on the road and get jumped by bandits - it can be pretty cut and dry. Bandits are the baddies and we don't have to dive too deep in to why they've made poor life decisions. Or maybe the bard tries for a nat20 to seduce the bandit leader. But if they bandits are goblins then the trope is that these bandits were simply born that way - they are inherently baddies and should be killed as they can be nothing but baddies. If we see a goblin on the road - kill it before it attacks.
That's where source material can do better. Me, myself... I set my goblins up with a social structure that rewards evil and aggression. Any goblin who doesn't adhere to that social structure is sent off on a fool's errand to die. Thus when the party finds a group of goblins... yeah... they're probably going to want to fight. But my party has also stumbled on a number of goblins who survived their tribes' attempts to kill them. They live quiet lives in a big city as a face in the crowds or isolated in small communities in the wilds.
Source material does a better service when it presents intelligent beings as more complex. We can still look at most goblins being antagonistic. But we don't have to lean in to our own, real dark history of treating other people as fundamentally flawed at birth. Our games can be better for it.
You have some of the best ad transitions and this was one of your best
I came to this expecting to disagree, but no, absolutely agree. The only thing I'd say is a concern is that if you're playing D&D, you should make people aware of what sorts of changes you're making, if you're hacking or houseruling the game. Obviously, on the fly little narrative cool things are just part of how DMing works, but I also think when you ask someone to play D&D, it's on you to make sure they understand if you're going to deviate from the written material in major ways. Hell, to some (like myself) it'll probably be a draw if you tell them that nobody in your game is evil because of genetics. :D
I've found a handy way to avoid rules tweaks becoming an issue is to have my players flat out tell me what interpretation of a rule their character requires to operate the way they want them to. At character creation, and each level up, they tell me what they chose, and how they want it to work. This allows me to not accidentally make a ruling that destroys their character build, and if they're misreading a rule (according to my interpretation) then they'll know in time to choose something else, or try to argue me into agreeing with them outside of the session where it won't hold everyone else up.
It also gives me a good read on what my players are doing with their characters, and I can sometimes get some great extra story snippets out of it that might lead to a little bonus for them down the line.
Oh God this is a good subject watching now for sure
To support your broader point about people not realising how much they can change - a very experienced RPGer of my acquaintance is developing a very negative attitude to 5e based on their experience as a player in Tyranny of Dragons - despite their experience they don't realise that it's a badly written adventure run by a DM who, from things I'm being told, is struggling with the system, adventure, or both. They just blame 5e and say it's "the worst".
Thank you! As someone whos been very invested in D&D becoming better, i genuinely hadn't even thought about the issues from the perspective of someone outside the hobby who might be interested.
4:49 Point of fact, too here...
While I acknowledge how aspects of Hadozee, Drow, Orcs, and whatever else specific people take issue with...please understand that, *I* as NOT an American, do not inherently see the racism your folk do. Its not in our culture, and its not in our history. The idea that we should all adopt the American way of culture, history, and thinking is...well...imperialistic; and dare I say, maybe an unintended contamination from Paperclip?
Then again, I may just be salty because the USA and CIA used PsyOps to affect a government change in my country, which resulted in us not being completely self-sufficient, and keeping our currency exchange well below yours... Hence why I have to pay $100 for a corebook for my hobby now. "Hmmm... groceries for a week, or a hobby book?"
14:10 But again, thats a very specifically American issue...
I am not from America, my First Nation friends dont find that stuff racist... if anything, we tend to take issue with the Illithid; as a veiled, not-addressed, r**e-allegory... 'Cause, y'know, they have their tadpole violate your body, twist you into one of their own, and make you do they same thing to someone else...all the while using mental powers to manipulate people...oh, and literally have slaves...
I understand your point, I do... because the rest of the world cant escape learning SOMETHING about America...
But the issues you point out, wont be the same issues someone in France, Ireland, Italy, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Australia, or Japan will see...but we have our own, for sure.
The Example List in the beginning was a bit to long.
I got it after 2-3 Examples, and it took a while from you to use these examples later on for an argument.
I love your videos but at that point it was a bit.. exhausting to listen.
All in all though a good video like always keep up the good work.
"Do DM understand how their changes effect the games balance" In my experience, No. Even for experienced DMs homebrew is largely a reactionary emotional choice without considering it's implications.
One DM I played with loved their critical fumble table (which I only found out existed after rolling a 1 during the third season) I tried to talk and explain how it disproportionately hurt martials. Which was shut down with 'I was wrong' and "it's just fun flavor".
Fast forward several sessions, we start combat and I go first. I attack twice hitting on the first and nat 1 the second. DM rolls a d100 for the table, it's a 97. I am then informed that my character is dead. From full health to dead in an instant, no death saves or anything. But not only am I dead, but the beast eviscerated me so completely that resurrection is not possible. "Cause dice need consequences". Turns out 95-100 is always permanent death in combat.
By that point in the campaign I had rolled on that table 7 times, all the other players combined had rolled 3 times. Needless to say I didn't return to that group.
A one shot that I was apart of comes to mind in regards to this topic. I was once part of a one shot where everyone had, more or less, premade characters made by the DM beforehand, that way we could just hop right in and play (this was to take place during a party, so creating characters was out of the question). The only thing the players had input in is what kind of character they would like to play (race, class, alignment), so the DM could match up characters with people/play styles. Anyways, one player was playing a Chaotic Neutral character and he, unlike more than half of us, had not really experienced a REAL D&D campaign. So this guys kept acting out. Antagonizing players, being argumentative, a lot of "well, why CAN'T I do this? I thought I could do anything I want?" type attitude. Any time during the game we would bring up that he was being toxic and not fun, he would clap back with "well, I'm just playing my character!" This player truly did not understand the nuances of alignment and how to role play to be fun and he could not understand, even after multiple of us talking to him, why he wasn't fun to play with. This player relied way too heavily on alignment, and forgot to just have fun and go on a silly adventure. If players are not in the fandom, and seen/experienced all kinds of different play, the rules are the ONLY things these people have to go on to play. Even then, most people don't read the PHB cover to cover and might end up missing a crucial piece of information that helps in their game.
I'm jumping into the comments to explain, from one white dude who's had this explained to him to another, why specifically the removal of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs wasn't an overcorrection:
When I asked an expat friend (who was not the only person I asked, but the only one who had the context to explain) whether he knew what the deal with that change was, he referred me to a pretty good bit of stand up from Trevor Noah about going to the US from South Africa for the first time and how uplifting, initially, it was for him that for the first time in his life, he was suddenly no longer 'half white for some and half black for others, but just black to everyone'.
In lots of areas in the world people with mixed heritage are referred to obsessively based on how their heritage differs from the local majority. If you have a European parent and an African parent in most of Europe, you're 'half black' (or if it's North Africa 'half Moroccan' or 'half Egyptian' etc...). If you have a European parent and a Japanese parent, you're 'half European'. This is even true in the US for everyone who has a white parent and a non-white parent who is anything other than black.
And while being constantly referred to by only the half of their heritage that the majority considers 'Other', all of these people face the full amount of racism that their non-majority parent faces while barely enjoying any of the privilege of their majority parent.
And that kind of 'defined by their non-default heritage' language is also used for Half-Orcs and Half-Elves in D&D. Despite both also being half human, they are only ever referred to by the half of their heritage that 'Others' them.
That's the absolutely understandable reason why WotC is considering getting rid of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs as distinct heritage options: People who already spend their entire life getting Othered as 'halfbreeds' and are, likely, playing a role playing game at least in part to get away from that, don't need to be confronted with a TTRPG system that codifies that exact kind of language in the very first step of character creation.
Best fix is ro simply keep everything, except the lore about the race and its characteristic bonus/minus, put those in a new section called setting and do a quick overview of: the lore in the forgotten realms and other setting with books to look at for more info, what that lore mean at character creation, for backgrounds and flavor, and what it does to the characteristic. That way you have a race that can be modified for any setting by simply adding or making lore for a setting.
Maybe this race was conquered in X setting and lost Y characteristic but again another and in a different setting were the conqueror and gain Y instead of X.
Setting
Forgotten Realms : quick overview of lore (were conquered), stat +2 endurance -1 dexterity, book reference
Eberon: Don't exist (make something for that campaign)
Planescape: quick overview(were conqueror) +2 dexterity -1 constitution, reference.
A way that I've seen a couple times, that requires a fair bit of nuance to pull off and is really only possible either in homebrew or with dedicated "players' guides" products and "dm facing" products, is putting forward "lore" that's actually written from a specific in-universe point of view. It would be amazing and organic to have consumed the propaganda about an ancestry or faction, and then discover that it isn't true and that you've been misled diagetically for political ends. I think that would do a lot more to breed socially conscious stories than a 'kumbaya fantasy', where everyone gets along magically.
Like, imagine if Wizards, instead of errataing out all the orc and goblin stuff from Volo's, developed and released an adventure where you come to realize that the orc and goblin camps in the adventure are resisting a deliberate campaign of relocation and extermination by a local duchy, backed by a splinter faction of a church. And that the church paid for a 'survey' of the region, written by Volo, and exacted editorial control over the writing of it.
That would not only shut up the lore purists and leave the only objectors exposed as naked reactionaries, but would illustrate and even educate about how this kind of thing happens. The risk is that only the biased 'lore' would be player-facing, and you'd stumble right into bad-faith criticisms all the same...still, if it could be pulled off...
I think it's funny when people complain about Wizards changing things, like the Hadozee or races being inherently evil, with the "Just homebrew if you don't like it" defense. Because like... they could also just do that. If it's such a non-issue to home brew it, then just homebrew it instead of getting whipped into a mob. Some people's kids.
"If we fail to learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it. And if we ignore history completely; why then, we are just doomed." I don't know if this is stated verbatim, but it is one of the things that I think about with the cancel culture we see going on today. Simply removing or changing something because it brings up bad history is unwise. Education about it and why the history was bad will get us far further in life than removing or changing it. While I agree with your points, I think your conclusion is a little off the mark. Rather than making changes to the lore, WOTC and the D&D community should be attempting to use the lore to educate new players/DM's so that real life is moved forward rather than backward. At the same time, I think some people are overly sensitive to certain subjects, and in seeking to avoid or eradicate those subjects, actually further the damage done by those things. Hence, they are doomed. Talking about it to bring awareness or finger pointing isn't enough. Education is important, even if we don't like the subject being discussed.
Another argument about why it matters; *The ability to change a rule is good, but is NOT a substitute for a bad default.*
It's the game designer's job to try and come up with a default ruleset for players- If they don't, they are not doing their job as a game designer. You genuinely *can't* build any game without defining default rules, and the ability for players to easily customise it afterwards doesn't change that. So, if part of a default ruleset is bad, customisation can only _lessen the damage_ but it's still the job of the game designer to intervene and fix the issue for the health of the game.
A great example in a videogame I like to cite: Don't Starve Together had an optional rule for years called Disease, which was a mechanic the playerbase universally agreed was terrible and highly recommended turning off- But at that point, Disease's only purpose was to be a trap for new players trying to learn megabasing.
Just because DST is so customisable, it didn't change the fact Disease was terrible and dragging the game down, so Klei chose to axe it from the game and reimagine the ideas they were originally trying to achieve with it. Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, DST is a worse game because Klei just said "turn it off in settings bruh" and used that to deflect criticism
At baseline, of course it doesn't "matter". But it matters as it pertains to the topic being discussed. "You can just..." is not an argument, it's a dismissal seeking to disengage from the discussion.
"Trying to change things that really shouldn't ever have made it into the 2014 versions of the books." According to the people who take issue with them. "Especially as a Black player how do you think it feels..." I mean, that depends entirely on the person. Black people aren't a monolith. My sister, who is Black, and my friend who is from Trinidad, for example thought both of those issues were totally overblown and in no way identified the Drow as representing Black people. My sister actually found that concept kind of racist as the *only* similarity is they have dark skin, and occasionally some uncreative art. She had similar feelings around the upset regarding half-elves and half-orcs, in that being mixed she found them a fun way of exploring some of the concepts, while also being divorced from the reality because they were so exaggerated and fantastical. it's almost like the fantasy was a heightened exaggeration of real phenomena allowing her to explore it without having to actually directly engage with it.
The difference between a subjective issue like those presented here, and a factual existential issue like climate change, is that the problem is situational. Presenting these problems as though they were intrinsically bad, when they obviously are not universally or factually accepted as being so, is that it perpetuates a false premise that those who do take issue with the subjective are correct, and those who do not are mistaken or acting in bad faith. People denying climate change, or perpetuating things that contribute to the issues bound up in it, are acting counter to facts. People who dig the Hadozee being a planet of the apes rip off are holding an opinion. Theirs isn't less valid because another segment of the audience interpreted the content differently and has a negative response to it.
As opposed to if a mechanical aspect of the game, like say True Strike, basically does not work as intended. The issues around the Drow, Evil Ancestries, Hadozee, and potentially problematic content, are subjective. That doesn't mean that the audience opposed to them is wrong to feel the way they do, or that WoTC is wrong to alter their content to court a demographic of their audience, but them doing so does not mean the content *WAS* intrinsically problematic, just that they decided to cater to those who found it so. Much like how all those who believe that the game containing demons, or violence, or "false" deities, has a negative effect on the minds of those who play these games are entitled to their opinion, catering to that opinion would not mean it is true or even reflective of wide held beliefs instead of a vocal slice of the audience (even though that was what happened in the Satanic Panic, when TSR catered to that demographic. I mean you could use a lot of the same arguments, and you see the same kind of responses. They changed the names of demons and devils, but didn't really address the issues that audience had with them either. And that audience truly believed that content and the playing of the game was as tangibly harmful to the culture and wider community as members of the current community do some of the aspects of ancestry and some modern content).
When we say things like "even when they're trying to be the good guys, there's no guarantee they're going to get it right." it takes a subjective opinion (there was a problem with races/ancestries/species as previously written) and treats it as a pass fail, right or wrong fact. Instead of a series of differing takes or interpretations that may or may not align. You can, and should, hold companies accountable to the degree that you are empowered to do so. But remember that when you do so you are essentially a lobbyist pushing your agenda, you are not inherently on the side of the angels because you are fighting what you think is the good fight, even if you win. And those companies are not inherently devils, even if they stick to their principles and do not alter their works according to your needs.
I totally get where you are coming from I started with 3.5 and just jumped in and built my own campaign and bumbled my way through it lots of rules went over my head. And some things that weren’t great happened. Luckily my friends went along with it and forgave me for those mistakes. The main reason I got through it was because of RUclipsrs who were putting out content and ideas to make games more fun and complex.
DMs have enough on their plate without having to fix the mistakes of the people who are supposed to be providing guidance. Not everyone is capable of creating effective homebrew and they shouldn't have to be. The whole point of buying the books is to have a guide to work from. If half that guide is useless because it's either badly designed or downright offensive, then WotC isn't doing their job right
12:09
As a black player, I literally don't relate to the drow because I'm not an elf. But on a serious note, I can understand some people see a PC species and identify with them, but I just... don't. They're an abstract concept of a living being that doesn't *actually* exist.
My biggest issues with the whole "just homebrew it" discussion is that nobody seems to undertsand that at a certain point you are no longer playing 5e.
one or two changes and you're still playing 5e, but after you're ignoring core rules of the game or tossed out a sizable amount you're not playing 5e anymore. If you want to play 5e - Play buy the rules.
If you want something other than the rules then play something else.
Which brings me to my next point. Too many people chnage and homebrew 5e or greater D&D to the point that it is so janky and poorly functioning that they're better of playing another system.
But far more often than no people play 5e with a bunch of really poor homebrew to make it into something else.
It's just counter productive and results in a poorer game.
I've yet to play a full game of DnD but have made a lot of characters for sh*ts and giggles. My most recent is a goblin cleric named Tibbs. She's nature domain and has a pet sugar glider. I'm in the middle of watching the mighty nein so both Jester and Nott were a big inspiration.
Tibbs is here to break the cultural expectations of her race by being kind and helping those in need
The current state of affairs at Wizards of the Coast, is what usually happens when a company started by creative people, is taken over by a corporation. When writing, designing and printing manuals, they are only concerned with cutting costs and increasing profits. They don't think about some twelve year old kid, who looks through their manuals, sitting on the shelf at Target, deciding whether or not they want to play.., I suspect if they do print manuals for the next edition, the books will be shrink wrapped.
My issue with homebrew is that where's the line for where honestly those people would be better off playing a different game and the culture of homebrew creates a negative community where people refuse to play anything other than D&D. D&D should be less popular, not because it's a bad game but because people should play more than just D&D.
The only thing dicey about this video was the transition to the outro! I keed, I keed. Thanks Mike, great video as always, appreciate you displaying your former wangrod self for all of us to learn from.
Nothing to do with the video per se, but I always see the copy of 11/22/63 and I was curious about it's prominence in the display? Favorite book?
How could you do this to me...give us a discount code for Only Crits? I didn't neeeed more beautiful sparkle rocks for a game I never get to play in person but now I've ordered two more seeeets T_T
I liked this video and agree with most of what you said. I do think the tittle is a little misleading. This video isn’t really about rules at all. I’d love to hear you talk about why the written rules of the game, and the system you’re playing matters, which is what I thought this video was at first. Keep up the great work Mike.
i feel like this is a little like original content vs fan works like fanfiction: fanfic writers take whatever they want from the original material and change things to fit their own ideas. but nobody would say "you know what? the original creators are not responsible for creating their content with care, bc fans can overpower the canon with their own stuff anyway" - fans fixing things in fan works don't erase the fact that it would've been better to not have insensitive content in the canon in the first place. d&d just seems different at first bc ppl are actively invited to change things while works like tv shows or books are not meant to be as interactive. but in the end, wotc-content is also a frame of reference that will make an impact on ppl looking at it from the outside as well as fans, which means that it should be handled with care.
just popping in to say i thought it was incredibly funny that for me i got the "if you already have all the OnlyCrits dice you need, no you don't", and then it immediately cut to a mid-roll ad, it was just oddly funny timing
12:07 Well, my friend loves the Drow. His favorite D&D character is Drizzt. oh, he's black, if that wasn't clear.
8:35 Better not tell them about the self-destruct mechanic I created for my kid's warforged because he thought it should exist. Not that he'll ever use it.
What a hilarious smooth slide to the sponsor. If I wouldn't have a dice embargo (wife: buy one more dice and you will eat it before you are allowed to eat me) I would totally buy some :)
"...maybe they'll think that if you like D&D, then you must inherently support this kind of content"
yep, that stung.
Oh man, are you telling me that the ALL white design team fundamentally don't understand racism? I would never have guessed.
Lol I actually remember that comment…. And mentioned how he made up something that hurt the PC…. And people had to point out that it was Liam’s idea
I think one of the traits under the Soldier background is pretty much PTSD...
If anything, the drow should paler in color than other elves from generations spent living underground.
People need to remember that D&D is a tiny tiny hobby. Less than 1% of world population.
Honestly, the amount of confidence one must have in themselves to say Matt Mercer of all people is a bad DM.
I thought you were gona discuss rules and optional rules. Not discuss old racist topics yet again.
Thank you so much for this, Mr. Mike. 💛
This all day!
When WOTC makes toxic content or even poor mechanics, they essentially force DMs to change things.
This is absolute negligence in design. It is a design failure to create anything that MUST be changed either for balance , verisimilitude, or basic decency.
EXACTLY! Like what's been said, DMs have enough on their plate. It sucks that WOTC makes material that we need to significantly alter to make it a good safe fun time at the table, on top of running and planning everything
I can understand that people do not like a roll to check if the character suffers PTSD, and I would not do it that way. That is however not a good reason to call someone a bad GM/DM, since it is pretty much in line with the ableism based rules that D&D is built on. Which is why I have thrown out that whole paradigm that most games use at the core of the design in our hobby, and made my own system very different from that.
Though Critical Role actually did this with Caleb in Campaign 2, but it was an agreed-upon thing by Matt and Caleb's player Liam pre-game (and given how specifically the mechanics of it were defined, they probably discussed it for a while). Actually a Campagin 3 character had something similar.
Mike, I enjoyed the video, but as a heads up, “uppity” was a racist term invented to describe black people who were trying to get “up”, above their supposed station in society. Just FYI
Good to know, thank you!
Quickly becoming one of my favorite creators
The comment about the PTSD save baffles me. Because, knowing that player, this is almost certainly something they asked for when making their chatacter.
Clarification: the comment you TALKED ABOUT, not your comment.
Your climate change analogy was spot on!
This is a good video.
This is a good channel.
I like Mike.
I will say I do think this is a really measured take on this.
Hi love your content
Love this topic. I am one of those 'keep the mechanics, but chuck some rules' GMs. The main thing for me, is: do my players at the table have an enriching, inversive experience, do they walk away with a pep in their step? As for the half-races being dropped, that is a thing that we voted to keep in our game - we have so many people of mixed heritage around us, that it seems almost insane to us that that is even a thing that WotC chose to do. Heck, I run a game where I teach, and I have 30 % mixed race kids. They were STOKED to see the half-elves and -orcs. But then, I also run races as individuals, not generic masses who submits to a stereotype.
I love that you are so very aware of what you do and that you are willing to re-evaluate and openly discuss your previous faux-pas, it makes you immensely relatable.
We had a chat about it this Saturday while we had our supper break, and my players laughed at me when I said I'd run away if we had a rules lawyer, because they'd CONSTANTLY shred my decisions. Know your rules, so you know how to break them responsibly, and be open about it. That is what I walked away with from that conversation. Gods, I love my players.
"As for the half-races being dropped, that is a thing that we voted to keep in our game - we have so many people of mixed heritage around us, that it seems almost insane to us that that is even a thing that WotC chose to do."
Ok, but they didn't drop half races. That's just what the headlines intended to generate rage clicks say. It's just no longer limited to only elves/orcs/humans. Half-elves and half-orcs aren't considered as a separate race than their parents, but are included in it. Now people can choose to be half gnome, half tabaxi, half anything else, and choose how their heritage shows up for them. In fact, for your kids it's even better, as they can now choose parentage that represents them even more closely. And I say this as someone who is part of cultural group legally referred to as halfbreeds up until a couple decades ago.
That make so much more sense!@@SheBeast-OG , thank you for clarifying. Really appreciate it.
7:13 yeah, can you imagine a world where bisexual genderfluid people exist in the first place? Let alone one where such atypical gender characteristics would be pushed to places like the circus..!
Lol I know, the way I phrased it kind of implies that a character like Molly is somehow a more ridiculous concept than PTSD, but ultimately my point was that a character like Molly pretty clearly indicates that the cast was using the game to represent a broader sampling of the human experience. So the idea that Matt might introduce a homebrew rule to represent one of those characters’ experiences shouldn’t be surprising if that commenter had been paying attention to what the group was actually doing in Campaign 2.
I really did enjoy that Indiana Jones video 👍
Random comment for the all gory rhythm.
Ah, this is even more fundamental of a video than the old 'system matters' stuff (yes, you can houserule. No, that doesn't mean you or that you're homebrew D&D 5e game to play a campaign inspired by Watership Down will work as well as either designing your own system to do that with, or using one of the existing systems clearly inspired by Watership Down (I know of two - Bunnies & Burrows and The Warren. And since the design ethos of both are vastly different, which of those you go with also matters, since the play experience of an 80s old school game is vastly different from a PbtA designed around generational play).
Houseruling is inevitable, at least outside of one-page games. Players are weird (I'm including myself in this), humans are fallible (I completely forgot to give my dinos gimmicks when running Escape from Dino Island recently, and that's not even particularly complicated a game - Accidental houserules are absolutely a thing), and what works for your table isn't going to work at someone else's, but picking the right game as your base to houserule from definitely helps.
I try and only pipe in with rules when I'm not running if the GM is asking for input (and/or after the game when discussing the on the fly ruling when that happens).
The PTSD rolls feels like it might be borrowing from GURPS and how that game handles mental disadvantages, though I suppose it could also come from Pathfinder's flat check concept and how some status effects require making one in order to successfully do the thing you're trying to do. (and that's another thing - The more systems you've played, the wider your palette to borrow from for houseruling rather than having to invent things on the fly. Which means that someone who's just running D&D for the first time has less of a toolbox with which to houserule D&D than someone who's played and/or ran - or at least read and/or watched a bunch of different systems)
While he's primarily a board game designer, Gil Hova's article on 'invisible ropes' - Sadly seemingly only available on the internet archive at this point - feels vastly relevant here to the lore stuff, but also just the general principle that it's generally not a great idea to houserule things until you know what the system is actually doing unless something comes up that the system isn't accounting for (at least, houseruling none-lore things), which does make 5e's 'ask the GM' approach to design a problem for getting people into the hobby.
Best ad work-in I've ever seen
As a DM with a heavy emphasis on lore in my games, I've been feeling very burned out with Wizards of the Coast for a while now. I homebrew a good amount of stuff for my homebrew world, but that doesn't mean I want to or should build everything from scratch. Between family and full time job, I don't always have time to come up with all that lore - it takes a lot of effort! It helps immensely when I at least have a decent starting-off point for lore, such as in the case with older races. Lately I've found that WotC have gotten lazy, giving very limited lore or lore that feels like a throw-away (really, Giff's whole thing is they fight over how to say their name? Really??). Reminder that I, as many other DMs, pay money for this, and fairly decent money at that. I don't think it's too much to expect some actual substance for our money.
Anything that doesn't effect balance I heavily endorse changing in a setting. Crossbows are now guns? Neat! There's a kingdom of gnolls, and they're the leading wizards of our era? Fantastic. Race is renamed to culture, and you can be as mixed race or uncommon as you like, as long as you abide by one stat block? Yes please. Let me play the Orc baby that got lost at see, and raised by tritons in their underwater kingdom. I'll use the simic hybrid stats to best fit the RP. Maybe they crafted me some sort of tools as I grew up or had some magic plant they used for outsiders.
I do try my best to stay within the official rules when it comes to mechanical balance, like homebrewing 'fixes' to ranger or monk, purely to avoid making additional work for the GM to vet or balance around, especially for fear of the snowball effect. I only worry about myself in that regard though, if a change helps another player have fun, please go for it, and the DM is welcome to bring any personal rules to the table they like.
I think what really helped me, with my 40+ years of playing the game, accept that the published rules need to be better is putting myself in the shoes of a new DM.
You're right, in that a brand new player/DM doesn't have the experience to figure out how to tweak or adjust rules.
Also, as you and others have said, the publisher needs to establish a better baseline of rules, and not rely on the community to make the adjustments at their tables.
I openly admit I haven't watched the vid yet but, based on the taglines, and having 40 years experience playing, and 30+ years of DM'ing D&D, I immediately think the exact opposite is true. If anything matters, it's homebrewing, then rules, then everything else...
Theres also another thing which is that often some maybe somewhat niche aspect of the lore that I as a dm may not like, unless it happens to come up in the game, that change may never get noticed by my players, so they may have some preconceptions that its as written and that may cause some issues. Such as for my new dragon heist campaign one of my players made a tiefling who was abandoned at birth at a monk temple of oghma and raised there, I didnt fully ask them but I assumed their reasoning for this was at least partly, tiefling racism being a big thing in the lore, but I dont like tiefling racism and generally ignore it (not major but still notable dragon heist spoilers ahead marked where they end) I got lucky and remembered the devilish cult among some of the waterdavian nobles that is a big player in the conflict and so I approached them to ask if they would like if their character came from "a cult of asmodeus spread across some of the nobles" so at least that way we were on the same page as I find that the only form of tiefling suppression/oppression thats interesting is more framed on strained/conflicting parental bonds from parents who try to hide their devilish ties that their own child is evidence of.
WATERDEEP SPOILERS OVER
(Also similarly are the drow which I mostly just changed by a couple things, the drow arent some evil monolith through just lolth bad lmao, the underdark as a whole is a harsh meritocracy with heavy religious bias to lolth, many drow are cast out for not conforming, and can be found all across the world, including some towns where they are a very common sight and just, a part of the culture, but that probably wouldnt be assumed by the average player unless it comes up.)
My viewpoint is that I am willing to make changes to support decisions made by my table. If I have a player who wants to play a character with PTSD I will ask do they want mechanical support that I will create or do they just want to roleplay it. Any mechanic can change and I usually create my own world. However, I am one man. I don't always have time to look through every race and class so when a player finds one they like we usually go with the general and adapt specifics to the world. Which means the lore as written by the publishing company is usually a players first impression of your game whether you are using it or not. When it comes to mechanics, yes, I can homebrew things, but this takes time and if I paid a company a sizeable amount of money I expect that to be saving time by using their rules. It gets to a point where i may as well not have bothered and given a different publisher my money.
Great video. I love that you articulate so well exactly how I feel about this same stuff. Keep on keepin on, Mike!
You are getting much better at making your arguments and adressing the correct stuff. Good job.
I always thought table by table rules were valid since each table is different and every gm being a different person and a different storyteller
I think the key difference is whether the argument is being made to empower GMs to do whatever they want at their tables (which is a good thing), versus whether the argument is being made in order to absolve the publishers of any responsibility (which I find to be far less helpful).
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
Great points made . Thanks