The race is on! Who will win? BG3 or D&D 5.5?
They want people like me, who used to purchase all their books, but stopped immediatly upon their announcement of the new edition, to get back to buying their books.
It makes sense financially, but I am quite certain it will lead to a mess. Backwards compatability with something that isn’t released yet? Recipe for disaster in my opinion!
A couple of gamer sins I want to confess on the most recently remarked upon D&D thread I can find;
- I really like Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse
- I LOVE Mage Hand Press’ Valda’s Spire of Secrets, which is currently only (legally) available as a .pdf via a late pledge on their fully-funded-and-finished Kickstarter (if you pay extra, you can get a hardcopy delivered or a VTT module for either D20 or Foundry - LATER, these extras are not yet available).
For those who haven’t seen it, the book is 380ish pages of really fun character options, spells, and some occasional Fourth Wall winking. I highly recommend it for groups who are:
- more than a little irreverent (eg - a Paladin of Heresy)
- enjoy a bit of humor (eg - the D&D sport, Siegeball)
- are dying to have Pathfinder-esque classes (eg - The Witch, done in a way that really nicely differentiates from Warlocks)
- or are interested in something truly unique (eg - The Warmage, a light-armored caster who ONLY uses cantrips but can highly modify/empower them).
10 new base classes (with subclasses)
Each already-existing class class gets 4 new subclasses
130+ spells
5 new races (with variants)
A few new mechanics easily introduced if wanted or ignored if not
. . . and I have to confess, I absolutely love the art style:
It should be noted that some of the stuff is covered in previous publications by Mage Hand Press, but it’s all been refined/streamlined/improved upon.
As for the cost; $30 for a .pdf? Yeah, that’s steep. But honestly totally worth it, at least for my group. I’m sure it can be found online if you want to peek into it before you buy; just please give them your money if you wind up “keeping” it.
Not sure why this is a sin! It’s a solid book. And Spire of Secrets looks super interesting, thanks for sharing it! I think my 5E playing Pathfinder-fan friends might find it particularly compelling for them, based on your description, so we’ll definitely give it a look.
Covid totally killed D&D for me. I was playing weekly up until Feb 2020. I did a few online games in the interim and my passion for the hobby was totally ruined. I put in so much work as a DM and people on Zoom just don’t care, plus you can’t really use your props or maps and minis like we used to.
I thought maybe it was my group, so I tried DMing for a new group of acquaintances. One of them took me aside after a few games. She gave me feedback about all the great things Matt Mercer does on Critical Role and how I should really listen to that and prepare more for sessions. My reaction was “Yeah, no.”
If this is the D&D thread now, I figured I’d lament here. The hobby has left me behind. Kids today all want to make catgirls and turtlefolk and half-angel vampires and bird people that can’t talk and I’m like, “what happened to the half-elf fighter?” IDK. Maybe I’m too old for this shit. Bird people are monsters.
It’s no secret I’m a huge Souls fan, and those are the kinds of D&D games I used to run and play in. The world is terrifying, the dungeons are dark and dangerous, your characters can die. My 1st 5e game was at PAX, in a public beta test, and Chris Perkins was there overseeing the tables. It was awesome and we all died. The dungeon was batshit crazy. My first 5e session, my players arrogantly thought they could hit a kobold lair and it was a TPK. Their next party rolled up on that same lair weeks later to see their previous characters rotting heads on spears outside the entrance.
Weird, unasked for personal thoughtdump here, but man, I have always felt the weirdest, completely unjustified aversion to third party D&D content.
I think it’s something like, “I want to approach the game on its own merits and play it as the designers intended,” or something in that thematic ballpark, except:
A) D&D was written from the beginning to be tweaked and adjusted and modified,
B) No one actually plays RAW, anyway,
C) The actual designers obviously have no idea what to do with their own ruleset, anyway, hence the constant parade of errata over the years, so why would a third party designer’s ideas be any less valid?
and, most importantly,
D) I don’t like completely played-straight D&D that much, anyway, so why would I want to make myself play it that way???
Reflecting on this recently, I came to the kind of funny-but-sad conclusion that I think my “try real hard to play D&D RAW” quasi-ethos was basically a subconscious self-sabotage to reinforce the fact that D&D “wasn’t really for me.”
Well, it’s that, or maybe flashbacks to the parade of hilariously overpowered, horribly written third party supplements my players were always trying to drag into the old Pathfinder 1E campaign I ran for a few years.
In any case, that book looks super neat; thanks for sharing it here :)
Online play sucks and blows and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. I endured it for a year and a half, because RPGs are a primary social connection mechanism with a bunch of close friends here in Raleigh (and was one of the few shared activities we enjoyed that could move online at all), but the second enough of us were vaccinated to feel safe gathering, I moved everything back in person as much as possible. The public games I run for our local Meetup group are still online for now, and every session I do for that serves as reinforcement of my thoughts on online play.
My whole GMing style is all about energetic improvisation and riffing off what other people are saying and doing and feasting on their energy like the fucked up extrovert vampire that I am, bopping from person to person and dragging them in with hand gestures and eye contact and wild voices, encouraging intra-party conversation and gags, and sticking everyone into tiny webinar boxes just completely saps the energy out of what I do in games.
Some RPG Youtuber recently had a video about how “the Matt Mercer effect is a lie!” and I can’t help but think that dude must not actually, like, interact with real human people in the wider gaming community or something, because what you experienced there is absolutely real and happens a weird amount. That said, hey, it was also a game problem that someone actually solved with conversation, which never seems to happen. “I have this expectation for the fun I want to have.” “I have a completely different expectation, cool, have a good life.” 98% of the threads on /r/rpg could be solved if people could just do that, hah.
Sounds like you need to go dive into the vibrant OSR community to me, man. That style of gaming is, like, 5000% not-for-me, but there’s a TON of people out there fiending for that kinda content. And, IIRC, you live in a big enough metro area that you wouldn’t be stuck looking online for players who’d love that shit.
Mind, it’d mean playing with relative strangers at first, but likeminded strangers, at least.
Hope you can find your way back to the kind of gaming you enjoy, dude!
I had started a campaign for our group here and the online factor kind of ruined it for me too. People definitely aren’t as committed to the moment online as they are in person. It’s definitely easier to meet up though, since we have kids and the other players do not.
Yeah. I play TTRPGs to meet and be with people. It’s a social thing. No online option carries the same feeling as sitting around a table, rolling physical dice, sharing snacks, and conversing with people. It’s just not the same at all. It’s like the difference between online classes and in-person school for kids. Something is lost in the translation.
Our DnD group survived on life support for about a year and a half after the pandemic started. My twins were the proverbial pillow over its face in its sleep. I’d be eager to get back to it in a couple of years.
Our group was kind of anomalous, though, in that most of us really preferred all of the quality of life stuff that Roll20 brought. Between that and the fact that we had an entire campaign’s worth of baggage stuck on the platform, we actually still used it on laptops even when we were able to meet in person.
My weird aside about cat girls was triggered by the anime art posted above. I’m not a furry. If you are it’s fine… That’s just not my thing! (I know it wasn’t furry art but the vibe of D&D has been going more anime and less Caldwell/Elmore as years have passed)
One of my favorite games I ran was Dungeon Crawl Classics. But the rule set was too arcane or we just didn’t have the patience for it. Which is why when Goodman Games started making 5e content I pounced on it. Hence the kobold lair tpk session I mentioned!
I don’t actually live in Boston anymore. I moved an hour out. I could still find a group I’m sure but my parenting schedule will make a regular commitment combined with a commute impossible.
EDIT: I don’t hate the 5e art! In fact, it has some of the best art in the history of the genre. This picture is absolutely amazing and I would hang this on my wall
My group also came from Pathfinder and were persuaded in part by the stuff contained here.
I’ll also say I really prefer how they did the Witch and Alchemist in this book over the Pathfinder approach.
I was of the exact same mind, and honestly some 3rd party stuff just isn’t high quality. Then I started thinking of D&D almost as Skyrim, which I would never play a second time through without mods. Well, this book is now my favorite, indispensable “mod” for 5E.
In my deep dive into YouTube 5E content I endured a lot of crap, but man, this entire series is PURE GOLD
I can really relate to your experience @Wallapuctus! I was mostly playing OSR games before 5e came out, switched to 5e happily, but it’s definitely moved away from what I liked, so I’m back to OSR stuff. I think Old School Essentials is pretty great for everything but character creation. Its overland procedures, dungeon procedures, random encounter procedures, combat procedures, and late game castle building stuff is all fantastic. For character creation, I like Whitehack (for experienced role-players) or a heavily modified version of Knave (for new role-players). Dungeon Crawl Classics is super cool! I’m jealous you got to play it, a bit too rules heavy for my groups I think. I want to get a group to try Into the Odd at some point as well, but I’m already at my limit with two games.
For me, the easiest way to get an OSR group has been getting friends into TTRPGs for the first time. Everything in OSR feels even more like what you’d expect from D&D than 5e, so it’s got the cultural familiarity going for it. The rules I run are a lot simpler than 5e. We focus more on discovering who your character is during play, with 15 minute random-tables based character creation, which feels much easier for new role-players. (If players don’t like their character after a session, they roll up a new one.)
We enjoy online play as well. Discord, whiteboard shared for maps or whatever and I just let the players roll or I roll if tis a secret. Then again, we’re not a group of randos, nor recruited/formed via a VTT.
I only play at gaming cons, and last year the D&D stuff was virtual. The Zoom thing just felt like I was on a work call.
I’ve really enjoyed the D&D AL stuff I have done, though.
To be clear, I adore Roll20 as a player. I’ve got an extremely bad back, so not having to hunch over some giant table to fiddle with minis every 3 minutes is fucking awesome, and having the ability to route die rolls and ability descriptions in from my virtual D&D Beyond character sheet via a browser plugin to basically automate everything is fantastic.
I just wanna do all that while, like, physically close to my fraaaaands.
That sucks, man. Smaller town gaming is definitely a challenge. I grew up in rural TN and feel that hard.
A buddy in our Meetup group is gonna run a couple of one-shots using this to try to drum up interest in the system. I love the vibes of the art. Not quite full color explosion like Mork Bork or as gonzo as DCC. Really nice middle ground.
Omg these feats are hilarious. I remember some of our homebrew from highschool, it was embarrassing. Now these nerdy teenager’s cringey power fantasies are immortalized on D&D Beyond for the community to give feedback on.
I remember my character from being a teen/early 20s. I made a glove that was like the infinity gauntlet that I could swap magic gems into for different powers. She was also a half half-elf and half incubus. So a tiefling, before tieflings were cool. But she wanted to pass for human so she filed off her claws and teeth to look normal, and cut off her own wings and had wing scars on her back. SO EDGY. I researched my own spells that were incredibly basic too. I wanted to do hadokens so I researched a spell that did 1d6 per level to a single target. Eldritch Blast, before Eldritch Blast was cool.
Anyway I loved her and had Reaper make a miniature of her for me years ago.
https://www.reapermini.com/search/nonalla
Look these handful of people loved my design!!!
That’s awesome! Love it.
A few years ago in our big teen superheroes game in RTR, I ran an angsty teen goth kid who’d lost his dad at like 11 and got super into his dad’s ancient stuff (AKA, a bunch of 90s alternative memorabilia – my PC woulda been born around 2005/6, oof). He was secretly powered by a faerie prince he’d struck a deal with to help that prince build influence in the mortal realms through an avatar, and after getting made fun of for basically having bright sparkly glitter powers, he begged his patron to let him “reflavor” things to be EDGY AS FUCK.
He never could get the wings to come in with black feathers, so he just started coloring them with cheap hair dye.
But thanks to the power of friendship and learning the value of being yourself, he eventually gave up his tryhard gothkid ways and embraced his definitely-not-broney-influenced roots and transitioned his superheroic persona to a faerie knight. No mini, but I did commission some absolutely sick art from a friend of a friend.
Nevermind the chains bound to his soul as insurance for the faerie pact. They’re just cool weapons, totally! Haha. Oh no.
I’m the opposite. COVID brought me back to roleplaying. I joined a London roleplaying club after all its branches moved online for 2 years. This got me back into roleplaying after near 30 years. 6 months ago, we went back to face to face and it was an awesome event. The DM had awesome props prepared for our first face to face. But we have been enjoying the campaign both offline and online.
Also, when one of us was feeling down after their vaccine booster last week, we just went back to our Roll20 game for the week. It’s good to have those skills handy for when a player can’t make it.
The 2 GMS / campaigns and 2 groups I played with online were both awesome. The second GM is going to run us through a face to face Call of Cthulhu campaign starting next month. I’m very lucky that COVID allowed me the time to rediscover TTRPGs.
I’m sure it was harder on the GMs though.
The club I joined has got branches around England, Wales and, soon, Scotland. I can’t say I see that tendency to only play super peculiar characters. We still get lots of newbies. And be it newbies or veterans, the classic races and classes seem to remain ever popular.
Not sure the hobby has left you behind as much as some groups have different expectations? But they aren’t necessarily the norm.
One thing is true: among all our branches, the one system for which tables consistently fill up and fill up first is D&D. That’s also the way we get more members to join before introducing them to all the other games we run.
Our SE London branch offers a good variety of games this quarter, but it looks like Space 1889 will be cancelled for lack of sign ups. Sad:
Anyway, don’t give up on 5E. There are many players who want to try it. And very many who will align with your tastes too.
