I don't always do it, but I like to ask at the end of a session "What do your characters want to do next?" If they don't have an answer, then I can create story hooks for them but if they do have an idea of what to do next then it saves me some time.
After I saw the tencent news and in 5 minutes figured out that it was a bait headline, I knew exactly which dnd RUclipsrs would make a bait video about it, and I was right about all of them. People are so willing to hate D&D they will accept any information true or not to support their narrative. I’m not the paragon of research and I’ve played into rage bait once or twice for the algorithm, but I couldn’t imagine doing that every single video, always searching for a new reason to get upset or call for the downfall of a company.
Man, Teos is just such a level-headed no-bullshit voice in this community. Pairing him with the three of you, you just know it's gonna be a great episode.
Back in the day, we had what was called bluebooking (after the blue exam notebooks used in college). You would write what you wanted your character to do between sessions and give it to the GM, and he'd write the answers back. Once e-mail became a thing, this practice moved online. It could be as simple as "I want to buy a horse" to in-depth dialogue with an NPC. The idea was to take character activity that would otherwise tie-up play time at the table 'off screen' so the other players weren't stacking dice waiting for the game to involve them.
Yup! I hosted a forum back in the day and we would have blue booking there, usually in public threads which sorta spoke to what Teos wanted from downtime.
In regards to in between story telling, my online group will sometimes earmark a scene, usually the time the group takes a long rest, and between sessions rolelay that scene over discord. It works out nicely because it keeps the valuable session time going at a quicker pace, give people time to think and respond to character moments, and also being a written log of the emotional bits that people often forget to include in session notes.
the segues seemed especially good this episode! i hope the change they make to the CR system is to really emphasize the assumptions it makes about how the game is played. like put it in big bold black letters. like is it based around having a lot of encounters per day? one big boss monster with or without minions? the party size of 5 characters? etc. lot of people say it's a bad system but maybe it's just conflicting assumptions
@@typoko that helps a little with the one boss monster or multiple monsters but not the adventuring day. it is good to know they are capable of doing it, so they should easily be able to put it in the new dmg
@@TonyRobetson I am guessing that they will have something completely different. But yeah, the other stuff in XGE is still way better than the normal rules. You don't get into situation where the danger level of a fight doubles when you add two squirrels to aid a boss. :)
51:00 OMG Dael! This west marches/guild hall thing you’re talking about is totally what I was thinking Wizards should do with or as a part of the adventures league! Like if they want to get money from players in a video game way, getting local coordinators and GMs to run a local guild and take a cut of Guild theme merch or buyable replicas of swag you could find in certain guild campaigns. Hosting larger events/epics with battle of the guilds with again special merch. Tapping into that Harry Potter house pride vibes or like the anime’s Fairy Tail or Back Clover where your guild is your found family. Man it would be great!
The CR system from what I understand, was built around an adventuring day of 6-8 encounters When running 5e I typically have 1, maaaybe 2 fights per session. Sometimes, none at all. I typically used a recommended CR+3, plus some fodder and things normally work out pretty well where one person might reach 0 HP if they get focused or unlucky
Loved the reworked counterspell and jump spells along with changing spells like guidence or bardic inspiration into reactions. I love the weapon masteries but weve been playtesting them and my guys constantly forget to use them. I like the bastion systems bones but I hope they improve upon it. Theres a lot to like and I'm excited to see what else they come up with between now and release.
~51min: Dael's concept with a Westmarches game of an adventurer's guild, where a forum/chat area is like the guild hall, where people come back and debrief the group? That's /exactly/ the concept I was trying to get my roommate on board with earlier this week. /Someday.../
my biggest concern of the 2024 books is that they are not going to support high level play, they have a game that goes to level 20 and only 1 published book that goes that high as well as are there going to be enough overall changes to make the new books worth while?
I maintain that the solution to druids constantly shifting for hit points was the exhaustion system they initially tried. Simply making them take points of exhaustion every time they get knocked out of an animal form would temper abuse a lot
XGE has a table for single boss monsters and a more streamlined CR system. Why no one is talking about it? I have yet to see anyone advocate people to use it when those rules are much better than the 2014 CR rules.
@@meikahidenori The book is pretty old at this point. It just feels strange that people wish for things that already exist. Those few tables would serve well any new or old DM.
Thanks for this upload. The math that goes into this game is the perfect balance with the art that is needed in this as well. It's why this stuff is so intriguing.
UA Feedback: I often wonder if that satisfaction rating is high mainly from a 'players' perspective, as opposed from a 'DM' perspective. So many things in the UA's are about getting more powerful player characters. I am not opposed to it, but how far are we going? In my opinion, PC death is a very rare occurance. Are we just making this game 'easier' for players? For gamers that enjoy a grittier game, will they be disappointed if there is not really a challenge to survive?
Difficulty is subjective. Throw things at them they aren't strong at or prepared for. Throw harder things than they expect. Don't let them rest as often There's so many answers here that counters we're making the game too easy. The game has ALWAYS been as easy or difficult as the GM wants and the group agrees to. And, on the flipside of that, in support of making things too easy, it's been trending hard towards power fantasy for decades anyway?
I'm really not a fan of the power creep the game has ramped up by orders of magnitude from Tasha's onwards. The direction of the play test has in no way curbed this.
To Dael - In regards to the Guild Hall D&D you mentioned around 51:00, that's how our group already plays. It's super fun, and great for groups with schedules that are all over the place.
The number of YT channels that run primarily on outrage is s bit crazy at this point. The problem is, it's too late to unring that bell because enough people _want_ to be outraged and flock to these videos to be angry in the comments, than spam Refresh to see who agrees with them. So much like Teos, I've just told YT I don't want those channels on my timeline anymore and haven't missed them one bit.
I enjoy in-between game session story telling as a player and as a GM. Sadly, very few of the gamers I have played with could give a care, even when they say it is welcome. It is so frustrating to send players game info related to their backgrounds and interests only to have them not respond and show up to game sessions and state that they didn't see or get around to reading what I sent. Others would read it and state that they had no idea what to do with the information. Not surprisingly, the latter gamers preferred roll-playing over role-playing at the table.
From what I understand that "Quantum Ogre" isn't they players picking a random path, and finding an Ogre no matter which way they go. It is the players being aware of the Ogre, and its most likely location then making smart choices to avoid it, but then just having the DM throw it at them anyways.
What I want is for someone to define what being a good "steward" means with regards to D&D. So many talking heads use it as a talking point but no one has actually bothered to define what they mean by it in any concrete sense. Establish something akin to KPIs and then the rest of us can measure it as well.
Between session storytelling is a great way to experience D&D without the mechanics of D&D. It also keeps the interest up for the next “at the table” session
I've been looking to start a campaign using the playtest material with some modifications. One modification is that I changed the original Exhaustion mechanic WotC made to 6 levels instead of 10 (with level 6 being death) and tacked on -5 ft speed to each of level of exhaustion, which I thought only seemed logical. In addition, both Revivify and any magical healing for a pc bringing them up from 0 incurs a level of exhaustion. i hope that with these rules, Healing being done prior to being knocked out at 0 HP will become a central aspect of the game. Definitely using the new playtest healing spells to encourage this. If I can get this started, I'll let you all know how it goes.
In the section on CR, is there anything to suggest that they haven't already been looking at ways to address current CR problems? Some of the recent monster design in Monsters of the Multiverse seems to indicate that they have been looking at ways to make changes. Or is it a matter of wanting to see some of those things in playtest? Either way, I doubt that they haven't been working on it until now.
Currently crying because everyone out here agrees the monk needed a rework but the game I play in has monks banned because the GM and one of the players think they’re too broken 😢 I’m never gonna get to monk am I
As for healing: it's not that 5e has made you indestructible, it's that the amount of healing you do vs the amount of damage you take makes preventative healing less valuable than reactive healing. It's more optimal to heal someone who is dying because the only hit point that matters is the last one, and if enemies are able to deal twice the damage that you can heal, why would you waste time trying to mitigate damage when you could just wait for them to go down and give them enough HP to stand again.
while the Cr rating can be much better, i think it salso saf eot say there are a lot of moving dfactors that go into it., Party compositon, play style, min/maxers vs roleplayers... how the party handles resoruce managmeent, 1st combat? 2nd combat? 3rd combat of the day? thats a lot of moving cogs n wheels
Not me wondering if I could have been in the same X-men play by post game as Dael. I feel like I’m prob older and it was on yahoo groups in like 1999 but…maybe?!?
Over the course of listening to this podcast i have subconsciously created an npc goblin herald called binbun. This makes me wonder what you folks views on commonly held stereotypes of npc accents e.g goblins are cockneys, dwarves are scottish etc. I like the idea of orks being texan and halflings having bad irish accents like johnny depp in Chocolat. Binbun has influenced me so much that all goblins in my head now have Australian accents. Gods have mercy on my players...
The "D&D is being sold" story seems like a perfect storm of echo chambers and rage bait, not just on RUclips. RUclipsrs took their cue from multiple stories, all of which trace back to one "news" article from China from a questionable company, which in turn may have scraped some speculation from a Roll For Combat video. (Source: Baron DeRopp and Roll For Combat.)
Is there literally anyone who actually prefers the old exhaustion rules outside of toxic gatekeepy "I want it be old and hard" if they dod rop it I'll just be baffled because literally I've only ever heard praise for it.
I noticed this like a year ago and it put me off. The classic algorithm title is always ‘This SUCKS’ or ‘do X better’ and its always the same five suggestions
I like listening to everyone on the podcast, and I love TTRPGs, but I don't find D&D news/rules interesting or engaging. Is there any chance you could talk about any TTRPG related thing except D&D? Your show so it's your choice.
I have no problem naming names: Dungeons & Discourse is one of the ragiest rage baiting channels that I see come across my feed. I kid you not, every single video they post is rage bait. There might be a couple that seem neutral, but otherwise it's all negativity.
I'm so baffled the enthusiasm for the proposed exhaustion rules hasn't died yet and I really hope they don't make it into the game. They're just really bad in a variety of ways: It's a lot of long-term book-keeping for sometimes miniscule impact. They're unnecessarily granular, bland and generic. They're completely out of sync with the rest and recovery system in the rest of the game, where a good night's sleep cures absolutely everything. Except exhaustion. The old system wasn't great and needed improvement. It didn't need being replaced. It's a trap, like making healing a regular in-combat thing.
So far alot of the changes to exhaustion are stuff we'll never use in our games since we don't use minatures or VTTS. I just want to know if they're going to accommodate theatre of the mind or text adventure/MUD players with this new material. If not we may just stick with the older materal. We already are kinda disappointed with the races in the game loosing some of their flavour and alot of the newer ones being forced into using the Tasha creation rules making players set most races up the same way and becoming quite bland skill wise, at least at our table. Fingers crossed otherwise yeah they're not going to be worth jumping to.
I like how they spent 5 minutes talking about how the article about selling d&d is false then end the segment stating every factual thing the article said (sell/license of ip digital rights for future d&d games) is true. Lol...
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I don't always do it, but I like to ask at the end of a session "What do your characters want to do next?" If they don't have an answer, then I can create story hooks for them but if they do have an idea of what to do next then it saves me some time.
After I saw the tencent news and in 5 minutes figured out that it was a bait headline, I knew exactly which dnd RUclipsrs would make a bait video about it, and I was right about all of them.
People are so willing to hate D&D they will accept any information true or not to support their narrative.
I’m not the paragon of research and I’ve played into rage bait once or twice for the algorithm, but I couldn’t imagine doing that every single video, always searching for a new reason to get upset or call for the downfall of a company.
Man, Teos is just such a level-headed no-bullshit voice in this community. Pairing him with the three of you, you just know it's gonna be a great episode.
Back in the day, we had what was called bluebooking (after the blue exam notebooks used in college). You would write what you wanted your character to do between sessions and give it to the GM, and he'd write the answers back. Once e-mail became a thing, this practice moved online.
It could be as simple as "I want to buy a horse" to in-depth dialogue with an NPC. The idea was to take character activity that would otherwise tie-up play time at the table 'off screen' so the other players weren't stacking dice waiting for the game to involve them.
Yup! I hosted a forum back in the day and we would have blue booking there, usually in public threads which sorta spoke to what Teos wanted from downtime.
Ah yes, my favorite podcast in all the realms
Stabatha has to be a core NPC in the Dael-helmed Barbie RPG.💡🧜♀
I hate the clickbait thumbnails. Drives me crazy. Especially certain channels that ONLY do click bait.
*Looks at title* - And now for the counter-bait meta that is also basically bait for anti-bait people.
An underliked comment
22:12 filet minion
Entertaining people. Very funny. You get sub.
Teos Abadia rules. I hope he shows up more to the Lorecast.
Agree with Dael, we're using the UA exhaustion rules in our Drakkenhiem and Netherdeep campaigns and it's much better.
In regards to in between story telling, my online group will sometimes earmark a scene, usually the time the group takes a long rest, and between sessions rolelay that scene over discord. It works out nicely because it keeps the valuable session time going at a quicker pace, give people time to think and respond to character moments, and also being a written log of the emotional bits that people often forget to include in session notes.
I was traveling for Winter Fantasy and I only now saw the thumbnail for this episode. Glorious! Thanks, friends!
"Minion Bae" 😂😂😂
Encounter building is like cooking! Average monster AC is the salt, average monster damage is the pepper and total monster HP is the cooking time!
Teos is the voice of reason.
"Just a human trying to make it work like the rest of us."
We need someone to draw Ben doing the "minion-bae" now.
I would like to hear you guys (including Shawn) review Rob Schwalb’s Shadow of the Weird Wizard out late February.
the segues seemed especially good this episode!
i hope the change they make to the CR system is to really emphasize the assumptions it makes about how the game is played. like put it in big bold black letters. like is it based around having a lot of encounters per day? one big boss monster with or without minions? the party size of 5 characters? etc. lot of people say it's a bad system but maybe it's just conflicting assumptions
Xanathar's guide to everything, page 88.
@@typoko that helps a little with the one boss monster or multiple monsters but not the adventuring day. it is good to know they are capable of doing it, so they should easily be able to put it in the new dmg
@@TonyRobetson I am guessing that they will have something completely different. But yeah, the other stuff in XGE is still way better than the normal rules. You don't get into situation where the danger level of a fight doubles when you add two squirrels to aid a boss. :)
51:00 OMG Dael! This west marches/guild hall thing you’re talking about is totally what I was thinking Wizards should do with or as a part of the adventures league! Like if they want to get money from players in a video game way, getting local coordinators and GMs to run a local guild and take a cut of Guild theme merch or buyable replicas of swag you could find in certain guild campaigns. Hosting larger events/epics with battle of the guilds with again special merch. Tapping into that Harry Potter house pride vibes or like the anime’s Fairy Tail or Back Clover where your guild is your found family. Man it would be great!
The CR system from what I understand, was built around an adventuring day of 6-8 encounters
When running 5e I typically have 1, maaaybe 2 fights per session. Sometimes, none at all.
I typically used a recommended CR+3, plus some fodder and things normally work out pretty well where one person might reach 0 HP if they get focused or unlucky
Loved the reworked counterspell and jump spells along with changing spells like guidence or bardic inspiration into reactions. I love the weapon masteries but weve been playtesting them and my guys constantly forget to use them. I like the bastion systems bones but I hope they improve upon it. Theres a lot to like and I'm excited to see what else they come up with between now and release.
Teos improves any show where he shows up ;)
~51min: Dael's concept with a Westmarches game of an adventurer's guild, where a forum/chat area is like the guild hall, where people come back and debrief the group? That's /exactly/ the concept I was trying to get my roommate on board with earlier this week.
/Someday.../
my biggest concern of the 2024 books is that they are not going to support high level play, they have a game that goes to level 20 and only 1 published book that goes that high as well as are there going to be enough overall changes to make the new books worth while?
I maintain that the solution to druids constantly shifting for hit points was the exhaustion system they initially tried. Simply making them take points of exhaustion every time they get knocked out of an animal form would temper abuse a lot
XGE has a table for single boss monsters and a more streamlined CR system. Why no one is talking about it? I have yet to see anyone advocate people to use it when those rules are much better than the 2014 CR rules.
Dungeon dudes did in one of their videos and I know Web Dm had as well. Old videos mind you so take a bit of hunting.
@@meikahidenori The book is pretty old at this point. It just feels strange that people wish for things that already exist. Those few tables would serve well any new or old DM.
Thanks for this upload. The math that goes into this game is the perfect balance with the art that is needed in this as well. It's why this stuff is so intriguing.
Yes, I have concerns about the encounter building myself. I wish we could have gotten a look at it and a few example monsters.
UA Feedback: I often wonder if that satisfaction rating is high mainly from a 'players' perspective, as opposed from a 'DM' perspective. So many things in the UA's are about getting more powerful player characters. I am not opposed to it, but how far are we going? In my opinion, PC death is a very rare occurance. Are we just making this game 'easier' for players? For gamers that enjoy a grittier game, will they be disappointed if there is not really a challenge to survive?
Difficulty is subjective. Throw things at them they aren't strong at or prepared for. Throw harder things than they expect. Don't let them rest as often
There's so many answers here that counters we're making the game too easy. The game has ALWAYS been as easy or difficult as the GM wants and the group agrees to.
And, on the flipside of that, in support of making things too easy, it's been trending hard towards power fantasy for decades anyway?
"lenient and forgiving?" has Teos ever WATCHED this show? :)
I'm really not a fan of the power creep the game has ramped up by orders of magnitude from Tasha's onwards. The direction of the play test has in no way curbed this.
4:30 Ameliorated- make (something bad or unsatisfactory) better.
That word works but the word I think you were looking for was “mitigated”
To Dael - In regards to the Guild Hall D&D you mentioned around 51:00, that's how our group already plays. It's super fun, and great for groups with schedules that are all over the place.
The number of YT channels that run primarily on outrage is s bit crazy at this point. The problem is, it's too late to unring that bell because enough people _want_ to be outraged and flock to these videos to be angry in the comments, than spam Refresh to see who agrees with them.
So much like Teos, I've just told YT I don't want those channels on my timeline anymore and haven't missed them one bit.
I enjoy in-between game session story telling as a player and as a GM. Sadly, very few of the gamers I have played with could give a care, even when they say it is welcome. It is so frustrating to send players game info related to their backgrounds and interests only to have them not respond and show up to game sessions and state that they didn't see or get around to reading what I sent. Others would read it and state that they had no idea what to do with the information. Not surprisingly, the latter gamers preferred roll-playing over role-playing at the table.
From what I understand that "Quantum Ogre" isn't they players picking a random path, and finding an Ogre no matter which way they go. It is the players being aware of the Ogre, and its most likely location then making smart choices to avoid it, but then just having the DM throw it at them anyways.
I have a nomination for next year's Ellies in the category of "biggest understatement": Teos Abadia, for saying "Economies are complicated."
Ben Byrne weeks ago: We don't use clickbait... but sometime I use it on thumbnails. To today's thumbnail. hahah love it.
What I want is for someone to define what being a good "steward" means with regards to D&D.
So many talking heads use it as a talking point but no one has actually bothered to define what they mean by it in any concrete sense. Establish something akin to KPIs and then the rest of us can measure it as well.
The way Dael describes her ideal PbP is exactly how all the PbPs I’m in are run! 😆
You’ve been away too long Dael.
They don’t seem to recall blade actually performing well helped open the door to the mcu
Between session storytelling is a great way to experience D&D without the mechanics of D&D.
It also keeps the interest up for the next “at the table” session
I've definitely had a Barbie rpg trying to dig its way out of my brain for a while now. Maybe it's time to actually work on it....
I've been looking to start a campaign using the playtest material with some modifications. One modification is that I changed the original Exhaustion mechanic WotC made to 6 levels instead of 10 (with level 6 being death) and tacked on -5 ft speed to each of level of exhaustion, which I thought only seemed logical. In addition, both Revivify and any magical healing for a pc bringing them up from 0 incurs a level of exhaustion. i hope that with these rules, Healing being done prior to being knocked out at 0 HP will become a central aspect of the game. Definitely using the new playtest healing spells to encourage this. If I can get this started, I'll let you all know how it goes.
23:15 July 15th? That'd be my birthday. That's whack. It'd be so funny if it drops on my b-day
Dael's access to children in questions, she does not recognize PJ Masks.
In the section on CR, is there anything to suggest that they haven't already been looking at ways to address current CR problems? Some of the recent monster design in Monsters of the Multiverse seems to indicate that they have been looking at ways to make changes. Or is it a matter of wanting to see some of those things in playtest? Either way, I doubt that they haven't been working on it until now.
Currently crying because everyone out here agrees the monk needed a rework but the game I play in has monks banned because the GM and one of the players think they’re too broken 😢 I’m never gonna get to monk am I
Do like I did with guns and tell the DM that you’ll run a game for him with him playing the new monk so he can see for himself how they play.
Find a new DM.
As for healing: it's not that 5e has made you indestructible, it's that the amount of healing you do vs the amount of damage you take makes preventative healing less valuable than reactive healing. It's more optimal to heal someone who is dying because the only hit point that matters is the last one, and if enemies are able to deal twice the damage that you can heal, why would you waste time trying to mitigate damage when you could just wait for them to go down and give them enough HP to stand again.
while the Cr rating can be much better, i think it salso saf eot say there are a lot of moving dfactors that go into it., Party compositon, play style, min/maxers vs roleplayers... how the party handles resoruce managmeent, 1st combat? 2nd combat? 3rd combat of the day? thats a lot of moving cogs n wheels
"I design more deadly encounters" -James
"I don't believe you" -me
Not me wondering if I could have been in the same X-men play by post game as Dael. I feel like I’m prob older and it was on yahoo groups in like 1999 but…maybe?!?
Over the course of listening to this podcast i have subconsciously created an npc goblin herald called binbun. This makes me wonder what you folks views on commonly held stereotypes of npc accents e.g goblins are cockneys, dwarves are scottish etc.
I like the idea of orks being texan and halflings having bad irish accents like johnny depp in Chocolat. Binbun has influenced me so much that all goblins in my head now have Australian accents. Gods have mercy on my players...
They have made all the classes stronger but mostly it marshal classes.
The "D&D is being sold" story seems like a perfect storm of echo chambers and rage bait, not just on RUclips. RUclipsrs took their cue from multiple stories, all of which trace back to one "news" article from China from a questionable company, which in turn may have scraped some speculation from a Roll For Combat video. (Source: Baron DeRopp and Roll For Combat.)
Is there literally anyone who actually prefers the old exhaustion rules outside of toxic gatekeepy "I want it be old and hard" if they dod rop it I'll just be baffled because literally I've only ever heard praise for it.
#duckswain
I noticed this like a year ago and it put me off. The classic algorithm title is always ‘This SUCKS’ or ‘do X better’ and its always the same five suggestions
I like listening to everyone on the podcast, and I love TTRPGs, but I don't find D&D news/rules interesting or engaging. Is there any chance you could talk about any TTRPG related thing except D&D? Your show so it's your choice.
I have no problem naming names: Dungeons & Discourse is one of the ragiest rage baiting channels that I see come across my feed. I kid you not, every single video they post is rage bait. There might be a couple that seem neutral, but otherwise it's all negativity.
I'm so baffled the enthusiasm for the proposed exhaustion rules hasn't died yet and I really hope they don't make it into the game. They're just really bad in a variety of ways: It's a lot of long-term book-keeping for sometimes miniscule impact. They're unnecessarily granular, bland and generic. They're completely out of sync with the rest and recovery system in the rest of the game, where a good night's sleep cures absolutely everything. Except exhaustion. The old system wasn't great and needed improvement. It didn't need being replaced.
It's a trap, like making healing a regular in-combat thing.
So far alot of the changes to exhaustion are stuff we'll never use in our games since we don't use minatures or VTTS. I just want to know if they're going to accommodate theatre of the mind or text adventure/MUD players with this new material. If not we may just stick with the older materal. We already are kinda disappointed with the races in the game loosing some of their flavour and alot of the newer ones being forced into using the Tasha creation rules making players set most races up the same way and becoming quite bland skill wise, at least at our table. Fingers crossed otherwise yeah they're not going to be worth jumping to.
Eww 5e, no thanks, OSR is much better.
I like how they spent 5 minutes talking about how the article about selling d&d is false then end the segment stating every factual thing the article said (sell/license of ip digital rights for future d&d games) is true. Lol...