Sposta: I actually reread the old thread where you took me to task over that issue recently. My stance has never been "never do the thing", it's been "understand WHY you are making any given decision in your game, including decision of chargen method. Understand the benefits it gives you, and the drawbacks you're taking on to get those benefits, and make an informed and deliberate decision towards the goal of building the kind of game you want to play/run rather than thoughtlessly knee-jerking one way or another because Tradition."
It's why I'm not trying to be nasty when I suggest that DMs who just cannot *stand* anything Tasha, who hate every species introduced since the PHB and half the ones in there, who couldn't contain their groans when the artificer went "core"? The highly, fiercely Traditional sorts who just can't get excited for all this newfangled junk and see nothing wrong with human-centric games of chucking jewelry in volcanos? Write pregens. Make it crystal clear that you expect THIS tone in your game, and ensure your game balancing is spot on to boot.
You're gaining the benefit of being able to very tightly curate the story you wish to run and account for every variable in pre-campaign prep. You're taking on the drawbacks of reduced player agency and investment, especially early on. I'm not willing to make that trade, but someone else very well might. It's a choice for those looking for a specific kind of experience. Just because it's Not Traditional doesn't mean you can't do it, if it truly suits the game you want to run.
Excellent. Then understand that in a campaign where you generate stats in order first, what you give up is absolute freedom to make any character you might possibly conceive of, but what you gain is the experience of creating a character under a set of strictures that might possibly compel you to create a character you otherwise wouldn’t and to grow with and discover that character through game play. Instead of falling in love with an idea, and then striving to force the rules to fit that idea, one instead creates a character that has certain flaws and limitations certainly, but also has unexpected strengths and merits and then falling in love with that character. It’s a wonderful way to experience D&D, one that I would like to share with you because we’re friends. So I’ll count you in.
Generally I use pregen for intro characters for newbies. While I, and most of us here, enjoy the process of character creation it is not simple and being able to get into a game quickly with newbies is useful. On the other hand, old pros can whip up a character in nothing flat and, after playing as many as many of us have basic race & class combos can get fairly boring. Opening up the process as M3 does and as I too suspect 2024 will can be enjoyable. As for lore I am mostly ( personally) interested in FR lore as I run a modified FR campaign. As long as they keep updates coming via either lore books or adventures as well as the occasional novel I’ll be happy. I suspect that those that use other settings feel pretty much the same about their settings. For those with the time and energy to do full on homebrew settings books and their lore can provide interesting ideas for tweaks to their worlds.
Quite frankly, I honestly do not know what your rant about pregen characters has anything to do with the discussion. Your just assuming that those who felt that the Monster of the Universe didn't include enough background run pregen characters. And that those players be damned of the players aren't railroaded by their gming. You have honestly lost me in what your talking about now, so I may very well having the wrong assumption, but that's what it sounds like you are saying. I don't know what the pregen characters thing came from nor do I know it's point in the discussion for it has nothing to do with the actually discussion. I did not come here to argue with folks, so please do not egg people into to doing so
Generally I use pretend for intro characters for newbies. While I, and most of us here, enjoy the process of character creation it is not simple and being able to get into a game quickly with newbies is useful. On the other hand, old pros can whip up a character in nothing flat and, after playing as many as many of us have basic race & class combos can get fairly boring. Opening up the process as M3 does and as I too suspect 2024 will can be enjoyable. As for lore I am mostly ( personally) interested in FR lore as I run a modified FR campaign. As long as they keep updates coming via either lore books or adventures as well as the occasional novel I’ll be happy. I suspect that those that use other settings feel pretty much the same about their settings. For those with the time and energy to do full on homebrew settings books and their lore can provide interesting ideas for tweaks to their worlds.
I do agree with what you said, for indeed I as well enjoy reading the lore and such that is include in the dnd books. If offers great building blocks when creating campaigns and such, yet it doesn't limit you to only using such items for you are able to shape and change the items as need be. I myself am building a gaint homebrew world and the editions of such lore in the dnd books offers great things I can model into my world as I wish. With and Multiverse books seemed to be lacking a lot of such Descriptions of races and such. I do indeed hope that dnd isn't forgoing those bits of lore.
The 'rant', as it were, concerned the fact that as far as I have been able to determine, the core of the complaints directed at/against those in favor of newer-style books such as M3 boils down to "why does nobody want to play with/use this super awesome lore anymore?"
If that is the question? Then remove the issue. Write that lore into pregenerated characters and make sure the awesome lore is baked in from the start. Make sure every pregen is as richly loaded with all the classic timeless fantasy tropes as it can be, hammer that lore in so thick and heavy you need an impact driver to fasten it all down, and go to town.
You'll be running a game for the sorts of characters you wanted to run, and players you pulled into this game don't have to worry about most of the junk that comes with chargen. You've built all their backstories already, written the only history you care about for them, done all the research and integration required. All the players have to do is follow the lines, run the sheet in front of them, and watch the story unfold. I've known plenty of folk who'd be down for that. I'm not one of them, neither are most of the'Power Users' here, but we're also not at your table so why does that matter?
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side. You get ultimate flexibility, but in return all of that comes with more burden on the DM to manage the game rather than play the game.
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side.
Existing lore is as often a problem for the DM as a time saver. It's often less effort to just make something up than go searching through voluminous lore to find what has already been said, particularly when there's a good chance that when you actually track down the lore... you don't want to use it anyway.
I tend to disagree. I search for roughly what I'm looking for or keywords in the text and drop that into the campaign I'm running if it applies to the setting. I do not enjoy the paradox of choice, and with undefined roles, that is what this creates in my opinion.
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side.
Existing lore is as often a problem for the DM as a time saver. It's often less effort to just make something up than go searching through voluminous lore to find what has already been said, particularly when there's a good chance that when you actually track down the lore... you don't want to use it anyway.
If there are volumes of lore then both options are available to every DM. Without the lore, only the option to make it up exists.
I feel that there's is a combination, lore is an extremely useful element for creation of worlds, and etc. As well I do see how lore can become burden some if you are running a pre made game. For you don't know ever detail. But in home made games you are not bound by such things and even in pre made ones you still can change and develope things as need be. Lore is a supplement, for sure you can always play with just dnd made lore, and nor is their a problem with it. You wouldn't be forcing your players to do one thing and only one thing, wether its background or the story. That's whats the lore is for is to create a world that you can take part in. And in homebrew games your making your own lore, working with players on what they wish to develop with in the world you created yourself, wether you based somethings within premade dnd stuff or not. And lore as a time saver can be very much so, now you don't have to spend hours creating your own, there's stuff already made, just a quick review of what your wanting to know before a session and your good to go. And I do see how It can be time consuming to look for specific points of lore players may stubble across in campaigns, only for you to not like it. But that's the neat part of DnD. Your not limited to the lore, you can change it if you feel like,
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side. You get ultimate flexibility, but in return all of that comes with more burden on the DM to manage the game rather than play the game.
The thing is I believe that the lore will be coming. I don’t want to bother to look if it was this thread or another, but Ive mentioned that I see M3 as basically book 1 of the “Next Evolution” of D&D and hopefully all the lore you could possibly hope for will be in campaign setting books that you or any other DM can pull from. It’s just not tied to the races or monster in general. Let the setting books tell you that elves are 5’ tall and dexterous and graceful on average in one setting and 7’ tall nomadic peoples running across desserts in another.
I like M3 but it doesn’t really matter to me as my DM has his own homebrew setting and only allows certain races as PC’s. And I’m cool with that.
Perhaps this will be better handled in the long run. But while I"m fine with the idea of publishing setting agnostic things and then having setting guides for different worlds... I don't see that on the horizon.
New players are going to have a harder time getting the FR lore now for those monsters/player races if they 'do' want to use the forgotten realms setting as a baseline. It's not always a binary of 'stick to the source book 100%' or 'make everything up yourself.' Sometimes it's nice to have a baseline starting point laid out for you and then change, add and remove things from there. That's currently where my preference falls in the game I'm running now. I took the world from the Grim Hollow player/campaign guide as a baseline, but changed things around. Building a world from scratch is too much work for me honestly. It's useful to have a starting point to work from.
Now that lore can't be found by just buying the book. It'll require extra work and time to track down for anyone who doesn't already own the older books.
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side.
Existing lore is as often a problem for the DM as a time saver. It's often less effort to just make something up than go searching through voluminous lore to find what has already been said, particularly when there's a good chance that when you actually track down the lore... you don't want to use it anyway.
If there are volumes of lore then both options are available to every DM. Without the lore, only the option to make it up exists.
Which is why I prefer to have the lore in the setting-specific books (like Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and Eberron: Rising from the Last War) instead of books that should be setting-agnostic, like the Player's Handbook and Monsters of the Multiverse.
I'm fine with volumes of lore. If I don't like it, I can just ignore it. If I like it (like in Eberron, Exandria, and Ravenloft) I will definitely use it. But it's pretty hard to ignore when it's built into the core assumptions of every race and monster in the game. That fundamentally alters the way newer players/DMs approach the core understandings of the game and is often hard to undo.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
New players are going to have a harder time getting the FR lore now for those monsters/player races if they 'do' want to use the forgotten realms setting as a baseline.
Heresy I know, but... there's way too much FR lore. The FR isn't a themed setting, it's a kitchen sink setting, where early game developers went "I want an X in my setting, so I'll shove them into this empty hole over here". Which is a perfectly functional method of world building for a while, but eventually becomes overwhelmed by decades of accumulated cruft, plus you start running out of convenient empty holes. The modern FR needs less canon and more convenient empty holes so modern DMs can emulate the early developers and stuff their own cool stuff in the holes.
The 'rant', as it were, concerned the fact that as far as I have been able to determine, the core of the complaints directed at/against those in favor of newer-style books such as M3 boils down to "why does nobody want to play with/use this super awesome lore anymore?"
If that is the question? Then remove the issue. Write that lore into pregenerated characters and make sure the awesome lore is baked in from the start. Make sure every pregen is as richly loaded with all the classic timeless fantasy tropes as it can be, hammer that lore in so thick and heavy you need an impact driver to fasten it all down, and go to town.
You'll be running a game for the sorts of characters you wanted to run, and players you pulled into this game don't have to worry about most of the junk that comes with chargen. You've built all their backstories already, written the only history you care about for them, done all the research and integration required. All the players have to do is follow the lines, run the sheet in front of them, and watch the story unfold. I've known plenty of folk who'd be down for that. I'm not one of them, neither are most of the'Power Users' here, but we're also not at your table so why does that matter?
My problem is still that players come to the table that first time for session 0 expecting the RAW to be the foundation of the game; not a huge house rules packet I've made up to basically restore everything to an earlier state - a situation they will probably dislike considering they spent money on the newer materials in the first place.
Again also, what you have to say makes perfect sense, IF I had the tools at my disposal to actually run a game my way like that. However, their doing things like discontinuing access to earlier books, and overriding other older information/builds on this site without even leaving the past versions as variant options is specifically the company trying to force me into running games using their new way if I wish to avail myself of the benefits of a site like this. I can't really run a game my way unless I largely ignore the tools on this site and do everything by hand using my old physical books.
In some cases, I don't want ALL the old material. I like some of the new material and wish I could pick and choose what I think is best and have that blend supported on the site.
Believe it or not, I don't actually set the majority of my games in Forgotten Realms either. I prefer Kalimar and Ravenloft. My 3e collection was written with Greyhawk as the core world rather than Faerun, yet I never really had a problem using monsters straight out of the core monster manual. Contradictions in lore were never really a problem and those campaigns did have their own corebooks too. Nevertheless I did like having the standard lore available to me.
I dislike this setting agnostic style. Even if they want to have and support dozens of official worlds to play in, IMHO they should still pick one to be the hubworld/center of the multiverse and use its lore as the foundation upon which other worlds lores are laid. It doesn't necessarily have to be Faerun or one of the already existing campaign settings, but I'd rather have Corebooks with fully developed and grounded lore than books making an effort to present loreless stat blocks that expect me to world-build around them.
I'm not really a world builder. I just run modules. Which by the by I also noticed that even the older modules are more thorough than the newer ones. I used to be told exactly what treasure an encounter would give my players. Now many encounters do not detail a reward, leaving that for me to decide. I agree with the folk saying WoC is using DM creativity as an excuse to be lazy these days and not have to provide fully fleshed out materials anymore. I just want a 'purchase and play it' set of materials where everything is ready to go right out of the box. I'm giving them the money so that I'm the one with the excuse to be lazy |;-PS
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I liked the fact that there was only one official world with one official history. Monster linked lore was pretty well set.
I miss the racial animosity that existed. It made for great character backstory. No one loved human but would work with them, elves trusted very few, and so on.
One huge map with a history that never even needed to be known by the characters, unless they wanted to know some of it. Isolated Islands were you could put those other new races into if you needed to. Like Dragon born and tieflings.
But those races would never be out in the main continents. Being unknown they would be hunted down like monsters and killed by all other races.
Races tended to group. Just like people do now. You tend to live with people like you.
There was enough room on the map to add in pretty much anything someone wanted without interfering with the overall history and lore.
The latter additions like DarkSun were never intended to be incorporated into the old world they were stand alone universes with all new monsters and settings only using the very basic roll20 system and over all concept.
Now that I am playing 5e there are things I like and some I do not like. I do miss the small cheaper adventure modules set someplace in the known world.(oerth) Any new spells, equipment, weapons potions and magic items needed to be discovered and were not available to every new character when written up.
Allow me to remind everyone that M3 is, if you will, book 1 of the new design test materials. Coming up next month is book 2 - journeys - an anthology of adventures then in August is book 3 - spelljammer - a new setting. We are all moaning and groaning about what we do and don’t like in book 1 and a lot of it seems to be driven by 2 things: 1) It’s, new, different and I’m out of my comfort zone so I don’t like it (yet). 2) I don’t really trust WOTC to do it right in the long run (I lived thru 4e and am scared this could be a redux just all the rest of you).
can I suggest we table this thread till after Spelljammer comes out and we’ve all had a chance to see how they handle stat cores, adventures and lore books and will have a better idea of what they have actually done and what we like and don’t like?
I know it used to be that supposedly WOTC never “followed” things here but I for one am fairly sure they or some folks in their employ ( alpha and beta testers etc) were always reporting back. This is just too good a source for ideas and critiques for them not to use it in some way . So while our fears and concerns are valid actually critiquing their work and how to improve it over the next 18 months should be even better.
As for lore itself, I love the stuff but I found that creating my own was a ton of work and as I got older I had less and less time to generate the whole cloth. Having a lore rich world that allowed for epic characters meant that for me FR was a far better place to do my thing with my epic/near epic ( see sig) characters that I was not willing to just put away. But lore was always a guide - a place setting to be disturbed by the characters and rest by the DM as needed. So I run part of my version of FR for those epics and run regular stuff elsewhere. But even there lore is is not god. My present campaign for the group I’m with is set in and around Luiren but uses a mashup of saltmarsh, all the phandalin based modules and will be getting into Aquisitions inc territory as well. Right now hey are about to take on the Wyvern Tor Orcs ( beefed up) with their 6 man team L3-5 + 2 bugbear “ sidekicks” and a small orc army of their own. Everything based off the existing lore but modified as I see fit to suit the needs of the campaign. I don’t have to create it all just modify as needed.
Yes the total lack of treasure associated to any monsters or NPC's in the new modules has led to a few DM's assuming there is non at all.
As a party we found a troll, killed the troll, and was then informed that said troll didn't have a home or place to keep his ill gotten gains. Our Ranger had no chance to backtrack him and even find it.
When he killed and possibly ate other beings did he eat all of their equipment also?
Due to this small oversight our new DM basically gave us nothing in order to buy rations or equipment with.
Yes the total lack of treasure associated to any monsters or NPC's in the new modules has led to a few DM's assuming there is non at all.
As a party we found a troll, killed the troll, and was then informed that said troll didn't have a home or place to keep his ill gotten gains. Our Ranger had no chance to backtrack him and even find it.
When he killed and possibly ate other beings did he eat all of their equipment also?
Due to this small oversight our new DM basically gave us nothing in order to buy rations or equipment with.
"The art of the Troll in the Monster Manual isn't carrying any belongings with it, so the troll you face doesn't have anything on it" is a simple, good explanation for why it might not have any loot. "The book doesn't tell me exactly what it has on it" is a bad excuse.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Excellent. Then understand that in a campaign where you generate stats in order first, what you give up is absolute freedom to make any character you might possibly conceive of, but what you gain is the experience of creating a character under a set of strictures that might possibly compel you to create a character you otherwise wouldn’t and to grow with and discover that character through game play. Instead of falling in love with an idea, and then striving to force the rules to fit that idea, one instead creates a character that has certain flaws and limitations certainly, but also has unexpected strengths and merits and then falling in love with that character. It’s a wonderful way to experience D&D, one that I would like to share with you because we’re friends. So I’ll count you in.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Generally I use pregen for intro characters for newbies. While I, and most of us here, enjoy the process of character creation it is not simple and being able to get into a game quickly with newbies is useful. On the other hand, old pros can whip up a character in nothing flat and, after playing as many as many of us have basic race & class combos can get fairly boring. Opening up the process as M3 does and as I too suspect 2024 will can be enjoyable. As for lore I am mostly ( personally) interested in FR lore as I run a modified FR campaign. As long as they keep updates coming via either lore books or adventures as well as the occasional novel I’ll be happy. I suspect that those that use other settings feel pretty much the same about their settings. For those with the time and energy to do full on homebrew settings books and their lore can provide interesting ideas for tweaks to their worlds.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Quite frankly, I honestly do not know what your rant about pregen characters has anything to do with the discussion. Your just assuming that those who felt that the Monster of the Universe didn't include enough background run pregen characters. And that those players be damned of the players aren't railroaded by their gming. You have honestly lost me in what your talking about now, so I may very well having the wrong assumption, but that's what it sounds like you are saying. I don't know what the pregen characters thing came from nor do I know it's point in the discussion for it has nothing to do with the actually discussion. I did not come here to argue with folks, so please do not egg people into to doing so
I do agree with what you said, for indeed I as well enjoy reading the lore and such that is include in the dnd books. If offers great building blocks when creating campaigns and such, yet it doesn't limit you to only using such items for you are able to shape and change the items as need be. I myself am building a gaint homebrew world and the editions of such lore in the dnd books offers great things I can model into my world as I wish. With and Multiverse books seemed to be lacking a lot of such Descriptions of races and such. I do indeed hope that dnd isn't forgoing those bits of lore.
The 'rant', as it were, concerned the fact that as far as I have been able to determine, the core of the complaints directed at/against those in favor of newer-style books such as M3 boils down to "why does nobody want to play with/use this super awesome lore anymore?"
If that is the question? Then remove the issue. Write that lore into pregenerated characters and make sure the awesome lore is baked in from the start. Make sure every pregen is as richly loaded with all the classic timeless fantasy tropes as it can be, hammer that lore in so thick and heavy you need an impact driver to fasten it all down, and go to town.
You'll be running a game for the sorts of characters you wanted to run, and players you pulled into this game don't have to worry about most of the junk that comes with chargen. You've built all their backstories already, written the only history you care about for them, done all the research and integration required. All the players have to do is follow the lines, run the sheet in front of them, and watch the story unfold. I've known plenty of folk who'd be down for that. I'm not one of them, neither are most of the'Power Users' here, but we're also not at your table so why does that matter?
Please do not contact or message me.
I'm not a fan of the new M3, I think it enables WOTC to be lazy in their content and forces DM's to do 100x the amount of work on the lore side. You get ultimate flexibility, but in return all of that comes with more burden on the DM to manage the game rather than play the game.
Existing lore is as often a problem for the DM as a time saver. It's often less effort to just make something up than go searching through voluminous lore to find what has already been said, particularly when there's a good chance that when you actually track down the lore... you don't want to use it anyway.
I tend to disagree. I search for roughly what I'm looking for or keywords in the text and drop that into the campaign I'm running if it applies to the setting. I do not enjoy the paradox of choice, and with undefined roles, that is what this creates in my opinion.
If there are volumes of lore then both options are available to every DM. Without the lore, only the option to make it up exists.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I feel that there's is a combination, lore is an extremely useful element for creation of worlds, and etc. As well I do see how lore can become burden some if you are running a pre made game. For you don't know ever detail. But in home made games you are not bound by such things and even in pre made ones you still can change and develope things as need be. Lore is a supplement, for sure you can always play with just dnd made lore, and nor is their a problem with it. You wouldn't be forcing your players to do one thing and only one thing, wether its background or the story. That's whats the lore is for is to create a world that you can take part in. And in homebrew games your making your own lore, working with players on what they wish to develop with in the world you created yourself, wether you based somethings within premade dnd stuff or not. And lore as a time saver can be very much so, now you don't have to spend hours creating your own, there's stuff already made, just a quick review of what your wanting to know before a session and your good to go. And I do see how It can be time consuming to look for specific points of lore players may stubble across in campaigns, only for you to not like it. But that's the neat part of DnD. Your not limited to the lore, you can change it if you feel like,
The thing is I believe that the lore will be coming. I don’t want to bother to look if it was this thread or another, but Ive mentioned that I see M3 as basically book 1 of the “Next Evolution” of D&D and hopefully all the lore you could possibly hope for will be in campaign setting books that you or any other DM can pull from. It’s just not tied to the races or monster in general. Let the setting books tell you that elves are 5’ tall and dexterous and graceful on average in one setting and 7’ tall nomadic peoples running across desserts in another.
I like M3 but it doesn’t really matter to me as my DM has his own homebrew setting and only allows certain races as PC’s. And I’m cool with that.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
Perhaps this will be better handled in the long run. But while I"m fine with the idea of publishing setting agnostic things and then having setting guides for different worlds... I don't see that on the horizon.
New players are going to have a harder time getting the FR lore now for those monsters/player races if they 'do' want to use the forgotten realms setting as a baseline. It's not always a binary of 'stick to the source book 100%' or 'make everything up yourself.' Sometimes it's nice to have a baseline starting point laid out for you and then change, add and remove things from there. That's currently where my preference falls in the game I'm running now. I took the world from the Grim Hollow player/campaign guide as a baseline, but changed things around. Building a world from scratch is too much work for me honestly. It's useful to have a starting point to work from.
Now that lore can't be found by just buying the book. It'll require extra work and time to track down for anyone who doesn't already own the older books.
Which is why I prefer to have the lore in the setting-specific books (like Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and Eberron: Rising from the Last War) instead of books that should be setting-agnostic, like the Player's Handbook and Monsters of the Multiverse.
I'm fine with volumes of lore. If I don't like it, I can just ignore it. If I like it (like in Eberron, Exandria, and Ravenloft) I will definitely use it. But it's pretty hard to ignore when it's built into the core assumptions of every race and monster in the game. That fundamentally alters the way newer players/DMs approach the core understandings of the game and is often hard to undo.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Heresy I know, but... there's way too much FR lore. The FR isn't a themed setting, it's a kitchen sink setting, where early game developers went "I want an X in my setting, so I'll shove them into this empty hole over here". Which is a perfectly functional method of world building for a while, but eventually becomes overwhelmed by decades of accumulated cruft, plus you start running out of convenient empty holes. The modern FR needs less canon and more convenient empty holes so modern DMs can emulate the early developers and stuff their own cool stuff in the holes.
My problem is still that players come to the table that first time for session 0 expecting the RAW to be the foundation of the game; not a huge house rules packet I've made up to basically restore everything to an earlier state - a situation they will probably dislike considering they spent money on the newer materials in the first place.
Again also, what you have to say makes perfect sense, IF I had the tools at my disposal to actually run a game my way like that. However, their doing things like discontinuing access to earlier books, and overriding other older information/builds on this site without even leaving the past versions as variant options is specifically the company trying to force me into running games using their new way if I wish to avail myself of the benefits of a site like this. I can't really run a game my way unless I largely ignore the tools on this site and do everything by hand using my old physical books.
In some cases, I don't want ALL the old material. I like some of the new material and wish I could pick and choose what I think is best and have that blend supported on the site.
Believe it or not, I don't actually set the majority of my games in Forgotten Realms either. I prefer Kalimar and Ravenloft. My 3e collection was written with Greyhawk as the core world rather than Faerun, yet I never really had a problem using monsters straight out of the core monster manual. Contradictions in lore were never really a problem and those campaigns did have their own corebooks too. Nevertheless I did like having the standard lore available to me.
I dislike this setting agnostic style. Even if they want to have and support dozens of official worlds to play in, IMHO they should still pick one to be the hubworld/center of the multiverse and use its lore as the foundation upon which other worlds lores are laid. It doesn't necessarily have to be Faerun or one of the already existing campaign settings, but I'd rather have Corebooks with fully developed and grounded lore than books making an effort to present loreless stat blocks that expect me to world-build around them.
I'm not really a world builder. I just run modules. Which by the by I also noticed that even the older modules are more thorough than the newer ones. I used to be told exactly what treasure an encounter would give my players. Now many encounters do not detail a reward, leaving that for me to decide. I agree with the folk saying WoC is using DM creativity as an excuse to be lazy these days and not have to provide fully fleshed out materials anymore. I just want a 'purchase and play it' set of materials where everything is ready to go right out of the box. I'm giving them the money so that I'm the one with the excuse to be lazy |;-PS
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I started way back. Back before advanced.
I liked the fact that there was only one official world with one official history. Monster linked lore was pretty well set.
I miss the racial animosity that existed. It made for great character backstory. No one loved human but would work with them, elves trusted very few, and so on.
One huge map with a history that never even needed to be known by the characters, unless they wanted to know some of it. Isolated Islands were you could put those other new races into if you needed to. Like Dragon born and tieflings.
But those races would never be out in the main continents. Being unknown they would be hunted down like monsters and killed by all other races.
Races tended to group. Just like people do now. You tend to live with people like you.
There was enough room on the map to add in pretty much anything someone wanted without interfering with the overall history and lore.
The latter additions like DarkSun were never intended to be incorporated into the old world they were stand alone universes with all new monsters and settings only using the very basic roll20 system and over all concept.
Now that I am playing 5e there are things I like and some I do not like. I do miss the small cheaper adventure modules set someplace in the known world.(oerth) Any new spells, equipment, weapons potions and magic items needed to be discovered and were not available to every new character when written up.
Well thats my rant for the day.
Allow me to remind everyone that M3 is, if you will, book 1 of the new design test materials. Coming up next month is book 2 - journeys - an anthology of adventures then in August is book 3 - spelljammer - a new setting. We are all moaning and groaning about what we do and don’t like in book 1 and a lot of it seems to be driven by 2 things:
1) It’s, new, different and I’m out of my comfort zone so I don’t like it (yet).
2) I don’t really trust WOTC to do it right in the long run (I lived thru 4e and am scared this could be a redux just all the rest of you).
can I suggest we table this thread till after Spelljammer comes out and we’ve all had a chance to see how they handle stat cores, adventures and lore books and will have a better idea of what they have actually done and what we like and don’t like?
I know it used to be that supposedly WOTC never “followed” things here but I for one am fairly sure they or some folks in their employ ( alpha and beta testers etc) were always reporting back. This is just too good a source for ideas and critiques for them not to use it in some way . So while our fears and concerns are valid actually critiquing their work and how to improve it over the next 18 months should be even better.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
As for lore itself, I love the stuff but I found that creating my own was a ton of work and as I got older I had less and less time to generate the whole cloth. Having a lore rich world that allowed for epic characters meant that for me FR was a far better place to do my thing with my epic/near epic ( see sig) characters that I was not willing to just put away. But lore was always a guide - a place setting to be disturbed by the characters and rest by the DM as needed. So I run part of my version of FR for those epics and run regular stuff elsewhere. But even there lore is is not god. My present campaign for the group I’m with is set in and around Luiren but uses a mashup of saltmarsh, all the phandalin based modules and will be getting into Aquisitions inc territory as well. Right now hey are about to take on the Wyvern Tor Orcs ( beefed up) with their 6 man team L3-5 + 2 bugbear “ sidekicks” and a small orc army of their own. Everything based off the existing lore but modified as I see fit to suit the needs of the campaign. I don’t have to create it all just modify as needed.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Yes the total lack of treasure associated to any monsters or NPC's in the new modules has led to a few DM's assuming there is non at all.
As a party we found a troll, killed the troll, and was then informed that said troll didn't have a home or place to keep his ill gotten gains. Our Ranger had no chance to backtrack him and even find it.
When he killed and possibly ate other beings did he eat all of their equipment also?
Due to this small oversight our new DM basically gave us nothing in order to buy rations or equipment with.
Yeah, that's not WotC's fault, it's the DM's. The Dungeon Master's Guide gives clear guidelines that the DM can use for randomly generating the average loot that monsters of different challenge ratings might have on them (or in their lairs). And if the Monster Manual included lair/treasure information for every single monster inside it it would be at least twice the length it already is. And maybe he's just inexperienced, but any good DM would/should be able to improvise treasure granted by the troll or given a better reason for the troll not having money on it than "the monster manual doesn't say it has anything".
"The art of the Troll in the Monster Manual isn't carrying any belongings with it, so the troll you face doesn't have anything on it" is a simple, good explanation for why it might not have any loot. "The book doesn't tell me exactly what it has on it" is a bad excuse.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms