Granted it is not a sourcebook/adventure but for the price the best value book for DMs is Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It is way better than the DMG and 1/3 of the price. 😁
Full up couldn’t agree more. The number of times I’ve gone back to the return of the lazy DM so often for either world building details, adventure planning, sooooo much. Easily most valuable homebrew assisting book I own. Cannot articulate how much it helps, and how it’s turned people interested in being DMs into competent DMs from the get go.
The random tables and the way to use them is priceless. You can pick what you need or you can randomize and make your adventure around that, adjusting lore to fit your setting.
This book has reinvigorated my desire toDM. I was so burnt out and not enjoying the hours of prep. Now I prep way less and actually have more fun.I actually prep what I need vs getting lost in the tiny minutia that doesn’t matter in long run. Thank you for this series
If value is your concern, 5e is not where you want to be. For less than 100 bucks, you can outfit an entire party with everything needed to have a literal lifetime of rpg adventures. Basic Fantasy RPG is a simple D20 roll high system that is COMPLETELY FREE in PDF and the physical books are sold at cost. You can buy a core book for everyone, all of the adventure module books, the equipment guide, and the monster manuals, as well as a bulk pack of dice, inexpensive notebooks, pens/pencils, a foldable battlemat, and inexpensive tokens for use as minis, and you have everything your party will ever need, for less money than setting one person up to DM 5e. With the exception of needing a small and simple conversion formula or chart for AC, it is also compatible with every module TSR ever wrote for D&D. It is the system I use for running classic modules like The Tomb of Horrors and I6 Ravenloft. It is far from the only choice when talking about games with extremely good value for money. Here are a few others, some a little more expensive, some a lot less expensive, in no particular order: White Box Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Cairn, Whitehack, The Black Hack, The Black Sword Hack, Swords and Wizardry, Iron Falcon, and plenty of others. They also all have the added major benefit of requiring WAY LESS WORK for the DM. With some of these, for a simple wilderness exploration or dungeon crawling session, you need literally zero preparation time. With some, the entirety of your preparation is "take the time to read the module." That's all you'll need.
between the SRD, dnd beyond, and 3pp you can play 5e for free forever. The ruleset is free, dnd beyond is free, and there is a ton of free 3pp content available.
Around the 10 minute mark, while talking about what creates the value of a book, you gave a fantastic explanation of the economic concept of Opportunity Cost. Some day I'm going to be a college professor, and I'm going to draw upon this for inspiration.
As a DM, I really like the anthology collections. I love pulling a handful of modules together to form a small region sandbox. I wish these were more common instead of these year long linear adventures.
Regarding the upcoming revision, I've checked out. I haven't been happy with WOTC's content for a good 5 years now. I don't remember who said but, but there's a quote from the TSR days: "D&D is too important to leave to Gary Gygax." This sentiment evolved when TSR collapsed: "D&D is too important to be carved up in a bankruptcy sale, we (Pre-Hasbro WOTC) need to save it." Then, "D&D is too important for one Hasbro to own alone, we need to release to everyone it via a new license." Now, it's "D&D is too important for even Wizards of the Coast to control". It's a tradition, not a product, and it can be whatever you make of it. You're the DM, you drive this car. Don't settle for a Clear Channel radio station that plays what's been approved for you, make your own damn playlist.
For waves of combat, for me worked well: - Have waves more or less "hard" with the DMG guidelines - Have a new wave every 2 rounds of combat Of course every other suggestion in this video is applicable!
The Dolmenwood campaign book may have the single best setting I've ever read. It is written for what is essentially B/X D&D so some conversion work would be necessary for 5e or other systems (although Shadowdark would be broadly compatible) but it's both extremely evocative + inspiring, as well as designed to be useable at a table. The final release isn't quite out yet, but keep an eye out for it because it is just amazing.
I had a gladitorial arena fight in the most recent campaign I ran. A fairly rich level of politics and machination developed around the arena, and it seemed like the players enjoyed that quite a bit. E.g., someone approaching the party to get them to "accidentally" kill a combatant in a non-lethal fight. They do it, a bunch of money changed hands and so-and-so suddenly has the resources to help them with their quest. But the victim's patron is extremely powerful, pissed and wants revenge, both in and out of the arena. Gotta skip town in a hurry, but there's a big prize if they do just one more fight... That turned out to be a really good way to get the arena stuff to be more than just a combat slog.
Those are such fantastic books to have. They're done in a way that you can easily incorporate almost anything seamlessly into nearly any world or setting and just have something you can run with. Want to run a themed city? There's tons to choose from with tons of details and damn near everything you need in a few sentences with hooks built in. If you're playing a generic fantasy setting, there is so much you can learn and use in those books they almost make the Core books useless. They are honestly some of the best sourcebooks released. I often find myself going through them more then official material.
@@zedgathegreat9122 Yeah. I'm running a homwbrew setting but I could incorporate the Cobalt Library into the setting and the chronurgy magic also. I don't want to run games in Tal'Dorei setting but using just some aspects is fantastic.
This was a great video. I bought the Eberron book some months ago and it's fantastic. I really appreciate all the other mentions to great things that don't come from WOC because I know I can get on PDFs from drivethrurpg, and that is way cheaper than importing books to my country.
I don’t think comparing recreational time, which gaming is a recreational activity for most of us, to our hourly wages is a quality comparison. I think it’s more worth comparing it to your recreational spending on other kinds of recreations with friends. For instance going to a movie. Getting together with friends to have dinner and converse. Sitting around and reading a book or watching a streaming service. Playing a video game. Most of us wouldn’t be spending our gaming time working if we weren’t gaming. But the recreation $$$ are still most often cheapest with the RPG so your point is still valid. Of course, opinions vary and most of this stuff is just how folks value their time and money.
As a fairly new DM, I value published adventures. They provide the scaffold for the game on which I can change/ flesh out with my own ideas, which I find way easier than coming up with an adventure from scratch (a good adventure anyway!)
My conception of explaining the use-case of the Steps: imagine you are told in 2 minutes you are running a oneshot with no prep at all, full improv. you wing it, and you manage to brainfart out a session, you'd give it a 2.5/10 by your normal standards. all through the session you do your best in the moment making up characters, locations, npcs, trying to tie things together. you didn't know exactly where the session would take you, but if you had just 5 minutes to think about each aspect, you could have brought the session up to an 8/10 easily. You now know the value of the 8 steps. The 8 steps are just distilled general prep advice to get you the most bang for your buck. You may not use it all, but it carries over to next time and isn't wasted. As with all prep it's just offloading the thinking from ingame to pregame- except the steps give you focus on what is most likely to come up and be of most value with your time, even if no one can plan for everything.
Love the content as usual. I'm a week into National Novel Writing Month, and as DMing bleeds so much into the world of writing fantasy, I'd love to know if there are some products that you feel would assist with the creative process, particular focused around setting creation or plot (front) creation. I've toyed with the idea of grabbing some random table books to help with determining or inspiring events throughout my story. I'd love to know if you've discussed this or if there are particular products you'd see as useful for this. Thanks!
So I run (paizo's) a 5E campaign in Golarion and loosely follow Rise of the Runelord AP. I love to pick up Ebberon based on all the good things I hear you say about it. What can I expect to use from the Ebberon setting in my current campaign?
"I couldn't do it otherwise and I can do it otherwise" is definitely a statement of a very experienced gm. Most of your comments about value are biased to someone with a ton of experience. For a newer GM, who is isn't great at writing adventures, who doesn't even yet know how to write a new adventure, the relative value of different types of products changes a ton. For someone published in the space, it's of course more useful to have source materials to seed your own, but the majority of ttrpg players and even GMs that's not the case.
you should build a 8 Step app, where you can fill in the answers for each step and eliminate them, either because you didn't use them or because they didn't make sense anymore. slowly a whole bunch of notes would build up
I would still love to know how you implement your 8 steps with a pre made adventure. Just reading ahead, especially where PCs can go in different directions, is a big task. Then dealing with a whole extra set of notes on top of the pre-made adventure notes is too much for me to keep track of (also a screen real estate issue, and I already run two monitors). I have seen you do your magic prep a hundred times, and admire it very much, but I think you must have internalized a lot of the material, and can improvise a heck of lot better at the table than I can. For me, the moment the PCs go off script is the moment I'm in trouble. I end up stammering my way through things, falling back on boring tropes and busily paging through my books trying to pull myself out of a hole.
For me quantity is not a big factor in terms of value, within reasonable bounds. Usability is more important, and how generally useful. I personally think Van Richten's would be my pick between that and Eberon because of the build your own Domain of Dread being so high value and how modular it is. Also the "Everything" books have done a lot to improve the game, they add something regardless of what you run. There's been nothing third party that's absolutely blown my mind in terms of value. I have a monster book addiction (and yeah, they absolutely are diminishing returns in terms of value) and soft spot for Kobold Press's source material and even though there are books which are competing or even better than what WotC is putting out there I haven't encountered anything that was on a totally different level in terms of value.
Another possibility for a gladiatorial battle objective: Win over the crowd! Neither opponent should want to finish the battle too quickly. Find ways to get the audience either cheering for you or booing you, for entertainment value. Think Pro-Wrestling...! If the spectators are bored, you loose.
Every time a new edition is released, three groups emerge: Those who laud the new edition and switch over; those who denounce it and continue using the past edition; and those who are new to the game and just buy whatever the current edition is.
Thank you for this video. With you talking about the quality of WOTC dropping lately I was trying to frame the question "What is a good value book" You answered that well today Again thanks. How would you rate Dread Thingonomicon or is it a different kind of book? Finally would you say Lazy DM \Companion is a sourcebook with all its rollable tables?
I definitely prefer source books. I still bought the dragonlance book last year but i would have paid 50% more for a sourcebook based in that world than a premade module book. I absolutely love wildemount and Taldorei books and i barely read 2% of them. my two weekly campaigns are based on each.
I wish they would make an efficient monster stat block like they used to do in 1st Ed. I want 1-2 pages where I can see every monster in the campaign in a compressed format. I hate having to flip through pages to see each monster. The current stat blocks are just too wordy and filled with too many filler words.
absolutely agree. I also don't like the very old school monster stat blocks without line breaks, but there must be an easy to use short format inbetween.
I haven't used this advice yet in any capacity, but I'd read one GM's advice was something like "I reskin the bear statblock for all my purposes? I don't know if this was from an OSR community or not, but I do often stare at the bears, wondering.
Granted it is not a sourcebook/adventure but for the price the best value book for DMs is Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. It is way better than the DMG and 1/3 of the price. 😁
Bless you
Full up couldn’t agree more. The number of times I’ve gone back to the return of the lazy DM so often for either world building details, adventure planning, sooooo much. Easily most valuable homebrew assisting book I own. Cannot articulate how much it helps, and how it’s turned people interested in being DMs into competent DMs from the get go.
@@SlyFlourish Gesundheit! *marker*🤣
The random tables and the way to use them is priceless. You can pick what you need or you can randomize and make your adventure around that, adjusting lore to fit your setting.
This book has reinvigorated my desire toDM. I was so burnt out and not enjoying the hours of prep. Now I prep way less and actually have more fun.I actually prep what I need vs getting lost in the tiny minutia that doesn’t matter in long run. Thank you for this series
Honestly this podcast is one of the best value products out there.
If value is your concern, 5e is not where you want to be. For less than 100 bucks, you can outfit an entire party with everything needed to have a literal lifetime of rpg adventures. Basic Fantasy RPG is a simple D20 roll high system that is COMPLETELY FREE in PDF and the physical books are sold at cost. You can buy a core book for everyone, all of the adventure module books, the equipment guide, and the monster manuals, as well as a bulk pack of dice, inexpensive notebooks, pens/pencils, a foldable battlemat, and inexpensive tokens for use as minis, and you have everything your party will ever need, for less money than setting one person up to DM 5e. With the exception of needing a small and simple conversion formula or chart for AC, it is also compatible with every module TSR ever wrote for D&D. It is the system I use for running classic modules like The Tomb of Horrors and I6 Ravenloft. It is far from the only choice when talking about games with extremely good value for money. Here are a few others, some a little more expensive, some a lot less expensive, in no particular order: White Box Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Cairn, Whitehack, The Black Hack, The Black Sword Hack, Swords and Wizardry, Iron Falcon, and plenty of others. They also all have the added major benefit of requiring WAY LESS WORK for the DM. With some of these, for a simple wilderness exploration or dungeon crawling session, you need literally zero preparation time. With some, the entirety of your preparation is "take the time to read the module." That's all you'll need.
Yeah! Basic Fantasy is such an amazing project!
between the SRD, dnd beyond, and 3pp you can play 5e for free forever. The ruleset is free, dnd beyond is free, and there is a ton of free 3pp content available.
@@craigofinspiration the words "D&D Beyond" and "forever" should never be used in the same sentence.
Around the 10 minute mark, while talking about what creates the value of a book, you gave a fantastic explanation of the economic concept of Opportunity Cost. Some day I'm going to be a college professor, and I'm going to draw upon this for inspiration.
That was awesome seeing the Question I asked in the video.
Yay!
As a DM, I really like the anthology collections. I love pulling a handful of modules together to form a small region sandbox. I wish these were more common instead of these year long linear adventures.
Regarding the upcoming revision, I've checked out. I haven't been happy with WOTC's content for a good 5 years now. I don't remember who said but, but there's a quote from the TSR days: "D&D is too important to leave to Gary Gygax." This sentiment evolved when TSR collapsed: "D&D is too important to be carved up in a bankruptcy sale, we (Pre-Hasbro WOTC) need to save it." Then, "D&D is too important for one Hasbro to own alone, we need to release to everyone it via a new license." Now, it's "D&D is too important for even Wizards of the Coast to control". It's a tradition, not a product, and it can be whatever you make of it. You're the DM, you drive this car. Don't settle for a Clear Channel radio station that plays what's been approved for you, make your own damn playlist.
For waves of combat, for me worked well:
- Have waves more or less "hard" with the DMG guidelines
- Have a new wave every 2 rounds of combat
Of course every other suggestion in this video is applicable!
The Dolmenwood campaign book may have the single best setting I've ever read. It is written for what is essentially B/X D&D so some conversion work would be necessary for 5e or other systems (although Shadowdark would be broadly compatible) but it's both extremely evocative + inspiring, as well as designed to be useable at a table. The final release isn't quite out yet, but keep an eye out for it because it is just amazing.
Well said. Gavin is the man
I had a gladitorial arena fight in the most recent campaign I ran. A fairly rich level of politics and machination developed around the arena, and it seemed like the players enjoyed that quite a bit. E.g., someone approaching the party to get them to "accidentally" kill a combatant in a non-lethal fight. They do it, a bunch of money changed hands and so-and-so suddenly has the resources to help them with their quest. But the victim's patron is extremely powerful, pissed and wants revenge, both in and out of the arena. Gotta skip town in a hurry, but there's a big prize if they do just one more fight...
That turned out to be a really good way to get the arena stuff to be more than just a combat slog.
Way to go man 👍
I'd say the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount also a good sourcebook, especially when paired with Tal'dorei Reborn.
Those are such fantastic books to have. They're done in a way that you can easily incorporate almost anything seamlessly into nearly any world or setting and just have something you can run with. Want to run a themed city? There's tons to choose from with tons of details and damn near everything you need in a few sentences with hooks built in. If you're playing a generic fantasy setting, there is so much you can learn and use in those books they almost make the Core books useless. They are honestly some of the best sourcebooks released. I often find myself going through them more then official material.
@@zedgathegreat9122 Yeah. I'm running a homwbrew setting but I could incorporate the Cobalt Library into the setting and the chronurgy magic also. I don't want to run games in Tal'Dorei setting but using just some aspects is fantastic.
Now I want to play a walrus man name Archibald von Tusker. X)
This was a great video. I bought the Eberron book some months ago and it's fantastic. I really appreciate all the other mentions to great things that don't come from WOC because I know I can get on PDFs from drivethrurpg, and that is way cheaper than importing books to my country.
I don’t think comparing recreational time, which gaming is a recreational activity for most of us, to our hourly wages is a quality comparison. I think it’s more worth comparing it to your recreational spending on other kinds of recreations with friends. For instance going to a movie. Getting together with friends to have dinner and converse. Sitting around and reading a book or watching a streaming service. Playing a video game.
Most of us wouldn’t be spending our gaming time working if we weren’t gaming. But the recreation $$$ are still most often cheapest with the RPG so your point is still valid. Of course, opinions vary and most of this stuff is just how folks value their time and money.
Thanks
As a fairly new DM, I value published adventures. They provide the scaffold for the game on which I can change/ flesh out with my own ideas, which I find way easier than coming up with an adventure from scratch (a good adventure anyway!)
My conception of explaining the use-case of the Steps: imagine you are told in 2 minutes you are running a oneshot with no prep at all, full improv. you wing it, and you manage to brainfart out a session, you'd give it a 2.5/10 by your normal standards. all through the session you do your best in the moment making up characters, locations, npcs, trying to tie things together. you didn't know exactly where the session would take you, but if you had just 5 minutes to think about each aspect, you could have brought the session up to an 8/10 easily. You now know the value of the 8 steps.
The 8 steps are just distilled general prep advice to get you the most bang for your buck. You may not use it all, but it carries over to next time and isn't wasted. As with all prep it's just offloading the thinking from ingame to pregame- except the steps give you focus on what is most likely to come up and be of most value with your time, even if no one can plan for everything.
The summary/timestamps are missing in the video description 🥲
😢
Added! I forgot to update the notes
🥳 Thanks!
Just saw the Planescape set for $50 on Amazon today (11/6)
can confirm
Love the content as usual. I'm a week into National Novel Writing Month, and as DMing bleeds so much into the world of writing fantasy, I'd love to know if there are some products that you feel would assist with the creative process, particular focused around setting creation or plot (front) creation. I've toyed with the idea of grabbing some random table books to help with determining or inspiring events throughout my story. I'd love to know if you've discussed this or if there are particular products you'd see as useful for this. Thanks!
Love this question. I’ve been dabbling in this as well. I created a kind of inspiration/brainstorming template that is helping me out.
So I run (paizo's) a 5E campaign in Golarion and loosely follow Rise of the Runelord AP. I love to pick up Ebberon based on all the good things I hear you say about it. What can I expect to use from the Ebberon setting in my current campaign?
Mythic Odeysseys of theros is the best for my money
"I couldn't do it otherwise and I can do it otherwise" is definitely a statement of a very experienced gm. Most of your comments about value are biased to someone with a ton of experience. For a newer GM, who is isn't great at writing adventures, who doesn't even yet know how to write a new adventure, the relative value of different types of products changes a ton. For someone published in the space, it's of course more useful to have source materials to seed your own, but the majority of ttrpg players and even GMs that's not the case.
you should build a 8 Step app, where you can fill in the answers for each step and eliminate them, either because you didn't use them or because they didn't make sense anymore. slowly a whole bunch of notes would build up
I would still love to know how you implement your 8 steps with a pre made adventure. Just reading ahead, especially where PCs can go in different directions, is a big task. Then dealing with a whole extra set of notes on top of the pre-made adventure notes is too much for me to keep track of (also a screen real estate issue, and I already run two monitors). I have seen you do your magic prep a hundred times, and admire it very much, but I think you must have internalized a lot of the material, and can improvise a heck of lot better at the table than I can. For me, the moment the PCs go off script is the moment I'm in trouble. I end up stammering my way through things, falling back on boring tropes and busily paging through my books trying to pull myself out of a hole.
I am doing it, it helps enormously with a pre written, maybe you are reading too far ahead ?
I didn't know Matt Colville was one of your patreons
For me quantity is not a big factor in terms of value, within reasonable bounds. Usability is more important, and how generally useful. I personally think Van Richten's would be my pick between that and Eberon because of the build your own Domain of Dread being so high value and how modular it is. Also the "Everything" books have done a lot to improve the game, they add something regardless of what you run. There's been nothing third party that's absolutely blown my mind in terms of value. I have a monster book addiction (and yeah, they absolutely are diminishing returns in terms of value) and soft spot for Kobold Press's source material and even though there are books which are competing or even better than what WotC is putting out there I haven't encountered anything that was on a totally different level in terms of value.
Another possibility for a gladiatorial battle objective: Win over the crowd! Neither opponent should want to finish the battle too quickly. Find ways to get the audience either cheering for you or booing you, for entertainment value. Think Pro-Wrestling...! If the spectators are bored, you loose.
Every time a new edition is released, three groups emerge: Those who laud the new edition and switch over; those who denounce it and continue using the past edition; and those who are new to the game and just buy whatever the current edition is.
Thank you for this video.
With you talking about the quality of WOTC dropping lately I was trying to frame the question
"What is a good value book"
You answered that well today
Again thanks.
How would you rate Dread Thingonomicon or is it a different kind of book?
Finally would you say Lazy DM \Companion is a sourcebook with all its rollable tables?
I definitely prefer source books. I still bought the dragonlance book last year but i would have paid 50% more for a sourcebook based in that world than a premade module book. I absolutely love wildemount and Taldorei books and i barely read 2% of them. my two weekly campaigns are based on each.
amazon has 3 for 2 going on now that includes ERftLW
I wish they would make an efficient monster stat block like they used to do in 1st Ed. I want 1-2 pages where I can see every monster in the campaign in a compressed format. I hate having to flip through pages to see each monster. The current stat blocks are just too wordy and filled with too many filler words.
absolutely agree. I also don't like the very old school monster stat blocks without line breaks, but there must be an easy to use short format inbetween.
I haven't used this advice yet in any capacity, but I'd read one GM's advice was something like "I reskin the bear statblock for all my purposes?
I don't know if this was from an OSR community or not, but I do often stare at the bears, wondering.
37:57 - actually, it doesn't...