This is not an advertisement for Level Up. I am posting this so everyone has the same frame of reference for discussion. I found these pictures of more of the Adept and what they get as they level.
It is a lot of content and as I stated previously, my vision is really bad, so it will take some time for me to go through this. However, I wanted to see what others make of it.
Can I ask why you need rules for something that really can be defined by a DM? Crafting rules for magic items exist in xanthers, they form a basis upon which DMs can then be creative and tweak and change.
Crafting by its very nature is a unique thing WOTC can’t rule for every idea a player comes up with. For instance I have a player who wanted to craft a crossbow attached to a shield, as a DM I sat down with him out of game and we worked out what it would look like and how it would operate. I then worked out how long it would take to R and D, have him some skill checks roles and decided a research cost and then once built a cost to reproduce.
Magic items are the same, a player comes to me with an idea and I then sit down and work with them to tweak it and then make up the components they need potentially turning it into a mini adventure.
this can’t be defined because however granular wizards get all layers would still ask to make stuff not defined in the rules.
Part of the reason for a push towards cooler crafting rules is that the rules in Xanathar's Guide are baby bottom booty buttcheeks. They're actively godawful, and consist of little more than "waste the party's time for a year or more and you may be allowed to get one item once, provided the DM never rolled a "your crafting effort is foiled and ruined and all the components are lost!" roll on the seven hundred Crafting Complications rolls made during your attempt!"
Secondarily, the oft-lauded idea of "you have to go on an adventure to get the crazy monster part you need to make your magic item!" means crafting is, at best, a once-a-campaign thing. It turns crafting from something somebody does on the side to help the party into the entire party's whole entire focus for multiple months, and a strong majority of D&D parties will not tolerate some crafty boi constantly coming up with new ideas and derailing their plot to go find junk to make into cool shit. For a lot of folks, that's only right and proper...but there's also a whole-ass artificer class designed to cater to the class fantasy of "Crafty Boi", and a whole lot of inventive players who play artificers with the hope and intention of Making Cool Stuff on the regular. The Xanathar's Guide crafting rules are horrifyingly antagonistic to regular crafting efforts, and they provide no guidance whatsoever to games and tables where crafting is meant to be a regular part of the adventure rather than a weird one-off the DM did that one time to get Carol to stop talking about the cool thing she wants to make before the party goes back to randomly assigned/rolled grab-bag loot they cannot use, sell, trade, or otherwise gain any benefit from whatsoever.
The Xanathar's rules treat crafting as an exception to the normal flow of game and a huge imposition on the party. People want rules that merge seamlessly into the normal flow of a game instead and allow them to do what people ACTUALLY MAKE CRAFTY BOIS TO DO(!!!), which is to equip themselves and their friends with the items and tools needed to excel in their adventures.
And this hence lies the problem, your table wants crafting to work one way, another table will want crafting to work another and a 3rd will not want to do it at all. You say that crafting a magic item takes too long, but there are many many DMs who dislike there players having access to magic items at all easily, let alone having rules that allow them to go off and make there own ones at will quickly and easily.
I doubt any crafting rules WOTC created would please even 50% of players and the moment a rule is defined for a thing you take away DM agency in determining how that thing should be done. Crafting in a TTRPG in my opinion should never be like crafting in a computer game, making a healing potion takes a week, not seconds. If it took seconds they would cost 5gp and everyone would have many.
Crafting is such a personal table based thing that any rules for it would need to be an entire supplement on their own covering every variation of table and this is the problem, DND 5th edition is a rules light game, the rules in the players handbook and DMG probably amount to about 20 pages of text, add in the optional rules in xanathars and Tasha’s and maybe you push to a 30 page rule book at absolute maximum. These are rules not how to run traps, or make a character, or spell lists. Compared to other systems this is so light weight. Add in crafting you double that amount just for one niche thing that many many tables don’t care about.
"We received thousands of votes on our first survey, which addressed the broader outlines of Level Up. Thank you to everybody who participated! From the start this has been planned as a data-driven process. These results — amongst other things — help guide us as we design the game. Some folks have asked why we’ve announced this project so long before its release; it’s so that we can get data at each stage in the process, and recruit great talent for our design team (more on that later!)
Anyhow, on to the survey results! Note that these questions were intentionally broad; each of these topics can be drilled into in more detail at a later stage.
These things were very important to you
100% compatibility with existing 5E material
Meaningful character choices at each advancement level
A fully fleshed out Exploration Pillar
A range of martial maneuvers to give non-spellcasters more options in combat
More ways to spend gold at higher levels
You were positive about
A crafting system for magic items
Mechanically distinctive weapons and armor
Culture and species being separated during character creation
Both a warlord class and a revised spell-less ranger
A more detailed skill system"
If this information is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't considering the activity on the En World Forums, you are wrong about what people want. It is very common for people on these forums to assume that what they think or want is the most common (including myself), but WotC uses survey just like En World has done to come up with what the majority of their target audience wants instead of just making assumptions.
Can I ask why you need rules for something that really can be defined by a DM? Crafting rules for magic items exist in xanthers, they form a basis upon which DMs can then be creative and tweak and change.
Crafting by its very nature is a unique thing WOTC can’t rule for every idea a player comes up with. For instance I have a player who wanted to craft a crossbow attached to a shield, as a DM I sat down with him out of game and we worked out what it would look like and how it would operate. I then worked out how long it would take to R and D, have him some skill checks roles and decided a research cost and then once built a cost to reproduce.
Magic items are the same, a player comes to me with an idea and I then sit down and work with them to tweak it and then make up the components they need potentially turning it into a mini adventure.
this can’t be defined because however granular wizards get all layers would still ask to make stuff not defined in the rules.
I could do all of that. It isn't that it is hard, but I want my players (and myself) to be able to sit down with the book and at least get an idea of how to go about doing something first. I want there to be some consistency that can be relied upon from one crafting project to another without having to write up my own rules. I want Tool Proficiencies to have a better defined purpose in the game, especially now that there is a class that is pretty much dedicated to them.
A lot of the people that I currently play with got their start from MMO's and more than one of them wants to craft things for themselves and the party in general. I want them to be able to do that without having spend a lot of time going back and forth about how to do it and be consistent. A passible set of crafting rules would help.
Edit: And what Yurei said
Ok while I can see how to newbies the idea of having to think this stuff through is daunting but what I think people need are not more rules, what WOTC needs to be much better at doing is presenting online resources to help teach DMs how to do this at their own tables. You may think crafting and using tools is a one size fits all thing that can have rules applied to make it work, but crafting by its very nature is different table to table player to player and DM to DM. So a set of rules that say X takes Y to make at Z cost and require ABC skill checks might be ideal for table 1 but tables 2-120 may well look at that and say, nope those crafting rules are rubbish.
Far better would be a series of articles by different DMs walking through how they manage crafting at their table, otherwise the very nature of the subject means you are looking at 50 pages plus of rules, tables, options and ideas for just one niche thing
Ok while I can see how to newbies the idea of having to think this stuff through is daunting but what I think people need are not more rules, what WOTC needs to be much better at doing is presenting online resources to help teach DMs how to do this at their own tables. ...
Far better would be a series of articles by different DMs walking through how they manage crafting at their table, otherwise the very nature of the subject means you are looking at 50 pages plus of rules, tables, options and ideas for just one niche thing
If you feel that defining something takes away DM agency, that's the very first thing that should be addressed. DM agency is or at least should be absolute. There is value in rules consistency across tables, especially with respect to something like Adventurers League, but when it comes to their own campaign DM agency trumps that.
WotC absolutely needs to do better helping DMs learn how to DM, but online resources are not the right way to go about that. Online resources should be about extras, options, ideas. "How to DM" is an essential quality they should address in the core books, and it so happens they have an entire book for that purpose: the Dungeon Master's Guide. Unfortunately, the DMG fails abysmally (I'll add an 'in my opinion' here, though honestly this seems so obvious to me I daresay the point doesn't need to be qualified like that) in doing what should be its main job. Various ways to handle special/magical items in a campaign - which would include the possibility of crafting - seems like a totally obvious subject to cover in the DMG. Instead what we get is about a hundred pages of tables and lists of stuff with one or two "unless you decide your game is different" sentences thrown in there, devoid of any suggestions or advice about why and how you might want your game to be different or even about how or why what's in the DMG is supposed to be great.
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Ok, my initial reaction to having all the options and abilities for the Adepts was a bit negative. They have a LOT of potential abilities to choose from and would certainly have more abilities than the current Monk. On the surface it looks like a serious jump in power.
But then I realized that while they may have a lot that they can do, all of those abilities are fueled by the same limited pool of resources. Kind of like how casters may have 9 prepared spells, but can't cast all of them due to a limited number of Spell Slots. So the Adept (Monk) just has more things they can do with their Ki Points in a given moment. I can live with that.
Now whether each of these "tools" are balanced... well, that is a different story. I like some of them quite a bit and they all allow for a level customization that I would really like to play with. But some of them are a bit much. Vengeful Spirit and Instant Step stood out as a bit much. Vengeful Spirit is I think WAY too much while Instant Step could be reigned in a bit and be fine.
All in all, I think the concept is good but it needs a bit more refinement. I hope WotC is watching and gives us something that falls more into the middle ground of what we have and what En World has going.
Ok while I can see how to newbies the idea of having to think this stuff through is daunting but what I think people need are not more rules, what WOTC needs to be much better at doing is presenting online resources to help teach DMs how to do this at their own tables. ...
Far better would be a series of articles by different DMs walking through how they manage crafting at their table, otherwise the very nature of the subject means you are looking at 50 pages plus of rules, tables, options and ideas for just one niche thing
If you feel that defining something takes away DM agency, that's the very first thing that should be addressed. DM agency is or at least should be absolute. There is value in rules consistency across tables, especially with respect to something like Adventurers League, but when it comes to their own campaign DM agency trumps that.
WotC absolutely needs to do better helping DMs learn how to DM, but online resources are not the right way to go about that. Online resources should be about extras, options, ideas. "How to DM" is an essential quality they should address in the core books, and it so happens they have an entire book for that purpose: the Dungeon Master's Guide. Unfortunately, the DMG fails abysmally (I'll add an 'in my opinion' here, though honestly this seems so obvious to me I daresay the point doesn't need to be qualified like that) in doing what should be its main job. Various ways to handle special/magical items in a campaign - which would include the possibility of crafting - seems like a totally obvious subject to cover in the DMG. Instead what we get is about a hundred pages of tables and lists of stuff with one or two "unless you decide your game is different" sentences thrown in there, devoid of any suggestions or advice about why and how you might want your game to be different or even about how or why what's in the DMG is supposed to be great.
I agree the DMG could be improved but, what would you remove for what would need to be a weighty section on crafting. Why would it need to be weighty, because it would need to be flexible enough for DMs to apply how they want without prescribing or limiting things. The problem with that is that covering it in 1-2 pages just won’t cover it off.
Crafting is such a varied wide ranging thing, how do you compare creating an existing item to wanting to craft something unique and new, either a mundane or a magic item. The first person that I have seen get it semi right online is Matt Mercer in campaign 1 of critical roll where Percy created such things as an electric glove, a silencer for his rifle (zone of silence) and crafted his entire rifle. These things took time and all we saw was the at table dice rolling after Taliesan stated he had talked in detail with Matt about his ideas away from the table.
Crafting is such a specialized and niche thing that I really don’t see the value in Wizards devoting pages and pages to it in the limited space that is the DMG.
I will also ask, what in the DMG is horrendous, it is very basic, as an experienced GM the world building sections where a fun flick through but didn’t give me anything new, but maybe 20+ years ago they would have done.
I will also ask, what in the DMG is horrendous, it is very basic, as an experienced GM the world building sections where a fun flick through but didn’t give me anything new, but maybe 20+ years ago they would have done.
Honestly, most of it. The worldbuilding sections are 90% lists of "maybe you want to have this on your world" - the exact thing that would be great as a web supplement, but in the DMG could be pared down to half or less of the pages devoted to it now and replaced with advice on how to cook up a world instead of the line-up-at-the-world-buffet approach we have now. Same with the treasure chapter, as mentioned above, and definitely same with the interminable tables of random X. More advice and fewer examples, please. Examples don't help with creativity half as much as even a semi-coherent pep talk would. Part 1, creating a world and a multiverse, is longer than part 3, running the game and the dungeon master's workshop - running the game alone should warrant more pages than worldbuilding IMO. Adventure environments and between adventures get as many pages as creating adventures and creating NPCs - surely that too doesn't seem like the right balance, never mind that the former two could be incorporated in the worldbuilding chapter in the first place? The whole thing just falls flat for me. Xanathar's DM tools chapter is, if you take out the score of random encounter tables, 50 pages of straight upgrades to the corresponding DMG content. It's certainly not perfect either, but it's all material that arguably should have been in the DMG in the first place.
Edit: while I'm at it, how nobody on the DMG dev team looked at the table of contents and thought that having worldbuilding be the first thing on the list and actually running a game all but last might just be the wrong way around is beyond me.
I will also ask, what in the DMG is horrendous, it is very basic, as an experienced GM the world building sections where a fun flick through but didn’t give me anything new, but maybe 20+ years ago they would have done.
Honestly, most of it. The worldbuilding sections are 90% lists of "maybe you want to have this on your world" - the exact thing that would be great as a web supplement, but in the DMG could be pared down to half or less of the pages devoted to it now and replaced with advice on how to cook up a world instead of the line-up-at-the-world-buffet approach we have now. Same with the treasure chapter, as mentioned above, and definitely same with the interminable tables of random X. More advice and fewer examples, please. Examples don't help with creativity half as much as even a semi-coherent pep talk would. Part 1, creating a world and a multiverse, is longer than part 3, running the game and the dungeon master's workshop - running the game alone should warrant more pages than worldbuilding IMO. Adventure environments and between adventures get as many pages as creating adventures and creating NPCs - surely that too doesn't seem like the right balance, never mind that the former two could be incorporated in the worldbuilding chapter in the first place? The whole thing just falls flat for me. Xanathar's DM tools chapter is, if you take out the score of random encounter tables, 50 pages of straight upgrades to the corresponding DMG content. It's certainly not perfect either, but it's all material that arguably should have been in the DMG in the first place.
I picked it up again and re reviewed it and yes, there are an awful lot of tables in it, personally I can't stand random encounter or loot tables, but I imagine there are many who use them there is also an awful lot of stuff that really I agree could be removed but I am conscious I am coming to it as someone who has been doing this for years and I don't like assuming something isn't useful to someone else.
I think we can both agree the DMG probably needs the most work and can be improved without actually changing the mechanics of the game. For me rather then adding new rules for things like Crafting putting in more detail supporting new DM's helping them both understand how to tell stories, but also how to innovate and be creative in how they use the rules they have and allow there players to do things. But the fact remains that no matter how good the DMG is, in many ways having it makes it already better then what i had back in the day, nothing is going to beat simply putting in the hours of doing the GM role and I think that is something that just has to be accepted.
The whole CR needs reworking as well, but again like I have said in the past I have yet to find a system that can mathematically help a DM create challanging encounters pitched just hard enough. Maybe if they try tweaking it to 3-4 encounters in a day, or find a way to allow the number of encounters faced to be plugged into the calculation?
1) I picked it up again and re reviewed it and yes, there are an awful lot of tables in it, personally I can't stand random encounter or loot tables, but I imagine there are many who use them there is also an awful lot of stuff that really I agree could be removed but I am conscious I am coming to it as someone who has been doing this for years and I don't like assuming something isn't useful to someone else.
2) I think we can both agree the DMG probably needs the most work and can be improved without actually changing the mechanics of the game. For me rather then adding new rules for things like Crafting putting in more detail supporting new DM's helping them both understand how to tell stories, but also how to innovate and be creative in how they use the rules they have and allow there players to do things. But the fact remains that no matter how good the DMG is, in many ways having it makes it already better then what i had back in the day, nothing is going to beat simply putting in the hours of doing the GM role and I think that is something that just has to be accepted.
3) The whole CR needs reworking as well, but again like I have said in the past I have yet to find a system that can mathematically help a DM create challanging encounters pitched just hard enough. Maybe if they try tweaking it to 3-4 encounters in a day, or find a way to allow the number of encounters faced to be plugged into the calculation?
1) Anything is usually better than nothing, as you point out in that second paragraph, but that doesn't make everything good. I'm not saying nobody could ever find the endless lists and tables useful, I'm saying similar content could be created in a much more useful format.
2) It might be a bit radical in practice, but just about all the contents of the DMG could be linked to how to tell stories - including crafting. A big part of the DMG should not be "here's how we do X", which implicitly suggests "here's how you should do X" despite any qualifiers WotC might add, but rather "here are a couple of approaches to X, followed by suggestions about why you might want to develop your own version of X and how you can make it an engaging part of the world and the adventures the party will set out on". Crafting magical items could be relatively common or it could be vanishingly rare; clearly the stories that will develop will differ significantly already because of that alone.
3) CR does need reworking, and I see how you can't find a mathematical system that does what CR aims at doing. I think that's because math, at least math that can be done without an advanced degree, can't account for all the circumstances in which an encounter might happen, all the creative solutions the players might come up with, or whether the DM picks a tactically astute approach or goes for brute forcing the fight with the enemy mobs. CR should explicitly be a ballpark number, and even then probably really a handful of numbers (CR 3 if alone and an open fight, CR 4 if more than one, CR 6 if ambushing, something like that). And I stress explicitly, since right now there are people asking if they did anything wrong calculating CRs or encounters because what happened at their game table didn't correspond to what the official calculation methods suggest should have happened. It's also just not great DMing to not deviate from what's in the module or your pre-game prep, just because those things should be theoretically correct. What happens in practice is more important than what should have happened in theory, and that's something that should be made more abundantly clear in the books. Run with the story that develops on the table, don't try to run the story that's in your or someone else's head.
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The DMG should be a D&D construction kit, lots of optional alternative rules, ways to play, expanded concepts like west marches, stronghold building, kingdom running, advanced and alternative systems, anything and everything to allow DM's to create their own custom way to play and of course most importantly 50 years worth of collected advice on the subject of running the game.
Not disagreeing here, but I really want the DMG to find a better balance between proposing a myriad of options and offering advice on making up your own things. Finding your own way to play and run a game should be more than a D&D LEGO set built from a giant box of blocks, DMs should be encouraged to think about what kind of blocks that maybe don't exist yet would be good for them.
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1) I picked it up again and re reviewed it and yes, there are an awful lot of tables in it, personally I can't stand random encounter or loot tables, but I imagine there are many who use them there is also an awful lot of stuff that really I agree could be removed but I am conscious I am coming to it as someone who has been doing this for years and I don't like assuming something isn't useful to someone else.
2) I think we can both agree the DMG probably needs the most work and can be improved without actually changing the mechanics of the game. For me rather then adding new rules for things like Crafting putting in more detail supporting new DM's helping them both understand how to tell stories, but also how to innovate and be creative in how they use the rules they have and allow there players to do things. But the fact remains that no matter how good the DMG is, in many ways having it makes it already better then what i had back in the day, nothing is going to beat simply putting in the hours of doing the GM role and I think that is something that just has to be accepted.
3) The whole CR needs reworking as well, but again like I have said in the past I have yet to find a system that can mathematically help a DM create challanging encounters pitched just hard enough. Maybe if they try tweaking it to 3-4 encounters in a day, or find a way to allow the number of encounters faced to be plugged into the calculation?
1) Anything is usually better than nothing, as you point out in that second paragraph, but that doesn't make everything good. I'm not saying nobody could ever find the endless lists and tables useful, I'm saying similar content could be created in a much more useful format.
2) It might be a bit radical in practice, but just about all the contents of the DMG could be linked to how to tell stories - including crafting. A big part of the DMG should not be "here's how we do X", which implicitly suggests "here's how you should do X" despite any qualifiers WotC might add, but rather "here are a couple of approaches to X, followed by suggestions about why you might want to develop your own version of X and how you can make it an engaging part of the world and the adventures the party will set out on". Crafting magical items could be relatively common or it could be vanishingly rare; clearly the stories that will develop will differ significantly already because of that alone.
3) CR does need reworking, and I see how you can't find a mathematical system that does what CR aims at doing. I think that's because math, at least math that can be done without an advanced degree, can't account for all the circumstances in which an encounter might happen, all the creative solutions the players might come up with, or whether the DM picks a tactically astute approach or goes for brute forcing the fight with the enemy mobs. CR should explicitly be a ballpark number, and even then probably really a handful of numbers (CR 3 if alone and an open fight, CR 4 if more than one, CR 6 if ambushing, something like that). And I stress explicitly, since right now there are people asking if they did anything wrong calculating CRs or encounters because what happened at their game table didn't correspond to what the official calculation methods suggest should have happened. It's also just not great DMing to not deviate from what's in the module or your pre-game prep, just because those things should be theoretically correct. What happens in practice is more important than what should have happened in theory, and that's something that should be made more abundantly clear in the books. Run with the story that develops on the table, don't try to run the story that's in your or someone else's head.
I think we are in pretty much agreement here, but the point you make about CR really does get the heart of the issue. I said earlier that the moment WOTC write out a rule it limits DM creativity, someone argued and said the rules can be ignored, and they are right, but CR is such a great example of something that, because it is defined, many feel they have to use to create all encounters. This is why I would love to see DnD 5.5E not add more mechanics and hard rules, but like you say provide inspiration for how DM's can apply the thin layer of actual rules and then use their own imagination to sculpt something in there own style.
RAW has become such a major thing now, Chris Perkins has said that he has had people message him that he has done things wrong in his own live games, this is Chris Perkins being told he has got rules wrong. As he attempts to continually point out the only key rule is that everyone has fun, Gary Gygax stated the rules where a guidline that could be ignored, changed and used as desired but so many now come to the game treating the rulebook and DMG as some sort of Gospel that must be applied exactly as written or you are not playing the game right
I think we are in pretty much agreement here, but the point you make about CR really does get the heart of the issue. I said earlier that the moment WOTC write out a rule it limits DM creativity, someone argued and said the rules can be ignored, and they are right, but CR is such a great example of something that, because it is defined, many feel they have to use to create all encounters. This is why I would love to see DnD 5.5E not add more mechanics and hard rules, but like you say provide inspiration for how DM's can apply the thin layer of actual rules and then use their own imagination to sculpt something in there own style.
RAW has become such a major thing now, Chris Perkins has said that he has had people message him that he has done things wrong in his own live games, this is Chris Perkins being told he has got rules wrong. As he attempts to continually point out the only key rule is that everyone has fun, Gary Gygax stated the rules where a guidline that could be ignored, changed and used as desired but so many now come to the game treating the rulebook and DMG as some sort of Gospel that must be applied exactly as written or you are not playing the game right
RAW has been a big thing probably since AD&D 2nd (possibly even earlier, not enough personal experience to say) and certainly since 3rd edition. Ruleslawyering is nothing new. Just about every big live game I can remember had someone make it clear the group wasn't going to do everything by the book, for various reasons, but it doesn't always get across. I'm not surprised Chris Perkins got called out, though it is a sad state of affairs. He's the quintessential DM for me, super knowledgeable, understated, makes the game entirely about the players, and does it all without needing props or gimmicks or having to look things up.
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All in all, I think the concept is good but it needs a bit more refinement. I hope WotC is watching and gives us something that falls more into the middle ground of what we have and what En World has going.
I looked at those pages you posted and noped the heck out. I don't want D&D to become anything close to that
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Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
You didn't offend him with your disinterest. You didn't offend him at all, in fact. [REDACTED]
You don't like it? That's perfectly fine. Explain why. Provide points to debate and discuss. Posting to say nothing but "lolnah" is pointless.
You don't like so much depth, diversity, and crunch for a class? Tell us why. Offer a well reasoned, cogently argued view on the proposed rules so people can engage with your ideas [REDACTED].
Notes: Please stay constructive, even when the other user is not.
This is not an advertisement for Level Up. I am posting this so everyone has the same frame of reference for discussion. I found these pictures of more of the Adept and what they get as they level.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
It is a lot of content and as I stated previously, my vision is really bad, so it will take some time for me to go through this. However, I wanted to see what others make of it.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
And this hence lies the problem, your table wants crafting to work one way, another table will want crafting to work another and a 3rd will not want to do it at all. You say that crafting a magic item takes too long, but there are many many DMs who dislike there players having access to magic items at all easily, let alone having rules that allow them to go off and make there own ones at will quickly and easily.
I doubt any crafting rules WOTC created would please even 50% of players and the moment a rule is defined for a thing you take away DM agency in determining how that thing should be done. Crafting in a TTRPG in my opinion should never be like crafting in a computer game, making a healing potion takes a week, not seconds. If it took seconds they would cost 5gp and everyone would have many.
Crafting is such a personal table based thing that any rules for it would need to be an entire supplement on their own covering every variation of table and this is the problem, DND 5th edition is a rules light game, the rules in the players handbook and DMG probably amount to about 20 pages of text, add in the optional rules in xanathars and Tasha’s and maybe you push to a 30 page rule book at absolute maximum. These are rules not how to run traps, or make a character, or spell lists. Compared to other systems this is so light weight. Add in crafting you double that amount just for one niche thing that many many tables don’t care about.
If this information is accurate, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't considering the activity on the En World Forums, you are wrong about what people want. It is very common for people on these forums to assume that what they think or want is the most common (including myself), but WotC uses survey just like En World has done to come up with what the majority of their target audience wants instead of just making assumptions.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Ok while I can see how to newbies the idea of having to think this stuff through is daunting but what I think people need are not more rules, what WOTC needs to be much better at doing is presenting online resources to help teach DMs how to do this at their own tables. You may think crafting and using tools is a one size fits all thing that can have rules applied to make it work, but crafting by its very nature is different table to table player to player and DM to DM. So a set of rules that say X takes Y to make at Z cost and require ABC skill checks might be ideal for table 1 but tables 2-120 may well look at that and say, nope those crafting rules are rubbish.
Far better would be a series of articles by different DMs walking through how they manage crafting at their table, otherwise the very nature of the subject means you are looking at 50 pages plus of rules, tables, options and ideas for just one niche thing
If you feel that defining something takes away DM agency, that's the very first thing that should be addressed. DM agency is or at least should be absolute. There is value in rules consistency across tables, especially with respect to something like Adventurers League, but when it comes to their own campaign DM agency trumps that.
WotC absolutely needs to do better helping DMs learn how to DM, but online resources are not the right way to go about that. Online resources should be about extras, options, ideas. "How to DM" is an essential quality they should address in the core books, and it so happens they have an entire book for that purpose: the Dungeon Master's Guide. Unfortunately, the DMG fails abysmally (I'll add an 'in my opinion' here, though honestly this seems so obvious to me I daresay the point doesn't need to be qualified like that) in doing what should be its main job. Various ways to handle special/magical items in a campaign - which would include the possibility of crafting - seems like a totally obvious subject to cover in the DMG. Instead what we get is about a hundred pages of tables and lists of stuff with one or two "unless you decide your game is different" sentences thrown in there, devoid of any suggestions or advice about why and how you might want your game to be different or even about how or why what's in the DMG is supposed to be great.
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Ok, my initial reaction to having all the options and abilities for the Adepts was a bit negative. They have a LOT of potential abilities to choose from and would certainly have more abilities than the current Monk. On the surface it looks like a serious jump in power.
But then I realized that while they may have a lot that they can do, all of those abilities are fueled by the same limited pool of resources. Kind of like how casters may have 9 prepared spells, but can't cast all of them due to a limited number of Spell Slots. So the Adept (Monk) just has more things they can do with their Ki Points in a given moment. I can live with that.
Now whether each of these "tools" are balanced... well, that is a different story. I like some of them quite a bit and they all allow for a level customization that I would really like to play with. But some of them are a bit much. Vengeful Spirit and Instant Step stood out as a bit much. Vengeful Spirit is I think WAY too much while Instant Step could be reigned in a bit and be fine.
All in all, I think the concept is good but it needs a bit more refinement. I hope WotC is watching and gives us something that falls more into the middle ground of what we have and what En World has going.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I agree the DMG could be improved but, what would you remove for what would need to be a weighty section on crafting. Why would it need to be weighty, because it would need to be flexible enough for DMs to apply how they want without prescribing or limiting things. The problem with that is that covering it in 1-2 pages just won’t cover it off.
Crafting is such a varied wide ranging thing, how do you compare creating an existing item to wanting to craft something unique and new, either a mundane or a magic item. The first person that I have seen get it semi right online is Matt Mercer in campaign 1 of critical roll where Percy created such things as an electric glove, a silencer for his rifle (zone of silence) and crafted his entire rifle. These things took time and all we saw was the at table dice rolling after Taliesan stated he had talked in detail with Matt about his ideas away from the table.
Crafting is such a specialized and niche thing that I really don’t see the value in Wizards devoting pages and pages to it in the limited space that is the DMG.
I will also ask, what in the DMG is horrendous, it is very basic, as an experienced GM the world building sections where a fun flick through but didn’t give me anything new, but maybe 20+ years ago they would have done.
Easily half of chapter 7 could be dropped without losing anything of consequence, that's 50 pages right there.
Honestly, most of it. The worldbuilding sections are 90% lists of "maybe you want to have this on your world" - the exact thing that would be great as a web supplement, but in the DMG could be pared down to half or less of the pages devoted to it now and replaced with advice on how to cook up a world instead of the line-up-at-the-world-buffet approach we have now. Same with the treasure chapter, as mentioned above, and definitely same with the interminable tables of random X. More advice and fewer examples, please. Examples don't help with creativity half as much as even a semi-coherent pep talk would. Part 1, creating a world and a multiverse, is longer than part 3, running the game and the dungeon master's workshop - running the game alone should warrant more pages than worldbuilding IMO. Adventure environments and between adventures get as many pages as creating adventures and creating NPCs - surely that too doesn't seem like the right balance, never mind that the former two could be incorporated in the worldbuilding chapter in the first place? The whole thing just falls flat for me. Xanathar's DM tools chapter is, if you take out the score of random encounter tables, 50 pages of straight upgrades to the corresponding DMG content. It's certainly not perfect either, but it's all material that arguably should have been in the DMG in the first place.
Edit: while I'm at it, how nobody on the DMG dev team looked at the table of contents and thought that having worldbuilding be the first thing on the list and actually running a game all but last might just be the wrong way around is beyond me.
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I picked it up again and re reviewed it and yes, there are an awful lot of tables in it, personally I can't stand random encounter or loot tables, but I imagine there are many who use them there is also an awful lot of stuff that really I agree could be removed but I am conscious I am coming to it as someone who has been doing this for years and I don't like assuming something isn't useful to someone else.
I think we can both agree the DMG probably needs the most work and can be improved without actually changing the mechanics of the game. For me rather then adding new rules for things like Crafting putting in more detail supporting new DM's helping them both understand how to tell stories, but also how to innovate and be creative in how they use the rules they have and allow there players to do things. But the fact remains that no matter how good the DMG is, in many ways having it makes it already better then what i had back in the day, nothing is going to beat simply putting in the hours of doing the GM role and I think that is something that just has to be accepted.
The whole CR needs reworking as well, but again like I have said in the past I have yet to find a system that can mathematically help a DM create challanging encounters pitched just hard enough. Maybe if they try tweaking it to 3-4 encounters in a day, or find a way to allow the number of encounters faced to be plugged into the calculation?
1) Anything is usually better than nothing, as you point out in that second paragraph, but that doesn't make everything good. I'm not saying nobody could ever find the endless lists and tables useful, I'm saying similar content could be created in a much more useful format.
2) It might be a bit radical in practice, but just about all the contents of the DMG could be linked to how to tell stories - including crafting. A big part of the DMG should not be "here's how we do X", which implicitly suggests "here's how you should do X" despite any qualifiers WotC might add, but rather "here are a couple of approaches to X, followed by suggestions about why you might want to develop your own version of X and how you can make it an engaging part of the world and the adventures the party will set out on". Crafting magical items could be relatively common or it could be vanishingly rare; clearly the stories that will develop will differ significantly already because of that alone.
3) CR does need reworking, and I see how you can't find a mathematical system that does what CR aims at doing. I think that's because math, at least math that can be done without an advanced degree, can't account for all the circumstances in which an encounter might happen, all the creative solutions the players might come up with, or whether the DM picks a tactically astute approach or goes for brute forcing the fight with the enemy mobs. CR should explicitly be a ballpark number, and even then probably really a handful of numbers (CR 3 if alone and an open fight, CR 4 if more than one, CR 6 if ambushing, something like that). And I stress explicitly, since right now there are people asking if they did anything wrong calculating CRs or encounters because what happened at their game table didn't correspond to what the official calculation methods suggest should have happened. It's also just not great DMing to not deviate from what's in the module or your pre-game prep, just because those things should be theoretically correct. What happens in practice is more important than what should have happened in theory, and that's something that should be made more abundantly clear in the books. Run with the story that develops on the table, don't try to run the story that's in your or someone else's head.
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Not disagreeing here, but I really want the DMG to find a better balance between proposing a myriad of options and offering advice on making up your own things. Finding your own way to play and run a game should be more than a D&D LEGO set built from a giant box of blocks, DMs should be encouraged to think about what kind of blocks that maybe don't exist yet would be good for them.
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I think we are in pretty much agreement here, but the point you make about CR really does get the heart of the issue. I said earlier that the moment WOTC write out a rule it limits DM creativity, someone argued and said the rules can be ignored, and they are right, but CR is such a great example of something that, because it is defined, many feel they have to use to create all encounters. This is why I would love to see DnD 5.5E not add more mechanics and hard rules, but like you say provide inspiration for how DM's can apply the thin layer of actual rules and then use their own imagination to sculpt something in there own style.
RAW has become such a major thing now, Chris Perkins has said that he has had people message him that he has done things wrong in his own live games, this is Chris Perkins being told he has got rules wrong. As he attempts to continually point out the only key rule is that everyone has fun, Gary Gygax stated the rules where a guidline that could be ignored, changed and used as desired but so many now come to the game treating the rulebook and DMG as some sort of Gospel that must be applied exactly as written or you are not playing the game right
RAW has been a big thing probably since AD&D 2nd (possibly even earlier, not enough personal experience to say) and certainly since 3rd edition. Ruleslawyering is nothing new. Just about every big live game I can remember had someone make it clear the group wasn't going to do everything by the book, for various reasons, but it doesn't always get across. I'm not surprised Chris Perkins got called out, though it is a sad state of affairs. He's the quintessential DM for me, super knowledgeable, understated, makes the game entirely about the players, and does it all without needing props or gimmicks or having to look things up.
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I looked at those pages you posted and noped the heck out. I don't want D&D to become anything close to that
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You didn't offend him with your disinterest. You didn't offend him at all, in fact. [REDACTED]
You don't like it? That's perfectly fine. Explain why. Provide points to debate and discuss. Posting to say nothing but "lolnah" is pointless.
You don't like so much depth, diversity, and crunch for a class? Tell us why. Offer a well reasoned, cogently argued view on the proposed rules so people can engage with your ideas [REDACTED].
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