D&D 5e - the Bad Bits

I've liked 5th ed D&D so much that I've binged on it recently. I've been DM and I've had fun as a player as well. Over all, good game. But I have bones to pick with you 5th edition. That's right, plural.

• Inspiration Irony Points
  Ludonarrative dissonance: In the video games industry we've struggled with this as more ways to gamify the content has creeped into play. The term refers to those moments that remind you you're playing a game when the purpose of the experience was to make you forget you're playing a game. And that is exactly what Irony Points do. If you want to use them in your games for whatever wishy washy reasons it states in the rule books then go for it - I'm all about experimentation. But the original intent, that of rewarding the player for being immersed in the game, defeats its purpose. At the moment the player forgets they have a spreadsheet of numbers in front of them that defines who they're playing, you the DM should then yank them out of that experience and make them look at that spreadsheet again, so they can add another number to it. The more I think about it, the more I hate the space it takes up on the default character sheet for 5th ed. I was originally on board, I tried them, and no it didn't feel good. They don't even feel good to spend either - why not just roleplay your way into having a permanent advantage? Why not just use one of your more interesting class powers? The more DMs I play under, the less I see this mechanic used. It should be relegated to the Dungeon Masters Guide as house rule funsies and not take up the space the saving throw against my spells should take. Which leads me to...
• The Default Character Sheet
  This is the smallest of my bones, I quite like it overall, but I play a lot of casters. In fact almost all the classes cast spells. So why when I'm starting a new character do I have this sheet that ignores that? I don't need several pages for a level 1 wizard and yet I'm adding side notes to every damn sheet. And so is every other player. It's not a strictly bad design, but something's definitely wrong there. Okay, I take it back. They assume you're using the 3 page variety which has spells and whatnot. That's better, not perfect but okay.
• Experience Points
  This is probably just me. I like that there's one table now. That solves a lot of mess. I still like levels - call me old fashioned but I like that treadmill of unlocking new powers. I don't get experience points. I never have. Perhaps it's the fact that they rocket up into multiple digits. Or that the DMG suggests a bunch of multiplication and division along with other decisions about how brutal the encounter will be. I thought White Wolf's story points were alright, not from a character development view (admit it, you're going to dump them all in Disciplines), but easy to keep track of. Preferably I'd like something I can use instead of just doling out 300-500xp every game. I like to reward completing adventures, not killing stat-boxes.
• Usability of the Books
  The 5th edition books are meant to be read. They are not meant to be used. The most shocking evidence of this are the beige on beige page numbers (that I can't see without my glasses on). I've not gotten through a single game without someone getting something wrong or right and spending the next 5 minutes searching through the PHB for the one sentence that capped an ability being game-breaking. And then we're all thumbing through the books because godammit if I get called up on this rule again then I want to know where the hell it is. Of course there isn't an online resource - WotC wouldn't make a cent otherwise. But where the hell is the app? I'm using all sorts of semi-legal options just to stop a game grinding to a halt whenever a caster uses a whacky ability. And then on top of that the whacky ability might be a class power - so the app I'm using doesn't have that functionality and out come the books again. Charge as much as you like for it. Piracy? Pump it full of video ads in the Android version until they pay to get rid of them. The Basic Players guide is out there - why not just put that in an ad supported free version? It would be so much better than these two PDFs that have almost identical covers in their iBooks preview and are as bloody irritating to navigate as the hard back books. I don't want it to be pretty - I just want blocks of stats, lists of esoteric crap and the occasional hyperlink I can poke to bring up a screen filling painting and go, "it looks just like this." I've just been watching the 2015 PAX game and ole Perkins starts flipping through the books several times. He has a tablet too. Is it company policy not to use Lion's Den or something?

I've yet to play enough to form nitpicks elsewhere. However, the issues above I'm running into again and again.

There are many gushing reviews of 5th edition, and rightly so. But we all have our flaws.

Spiders, They're Pretty Sweet

This week I tried out spiders.

I had high hopes for these monsters and boy did they deliver. Mechanically they've got a decent set of moves. They can stealth, they have high mobility and they either do safe damage or can send a player into a blind panic from failing a poison check. (Of course I added homebrew variants so dwarves can experience the fun as well.)

But it's the web theme that really works wonders. Webbing is tripwire. It turns the entire dungeon crawl into a set of meaningful traps. It lets you go up walls and do really strange things with the space. And the dungeon can do that because spiders can climb. And when you cap it off with an intelligence controlling the spiders you get something a bit more like this:

A Monk(3), Cleric(2) and Fighter(2) tackled this all out hack and slash adventure. They took a fair beating but managed to avoid any K.O.s by using every skill they had and taking some rests.

If I revisit having a monster amount of players I'll probably run this adventure again. It seems to scale well and there's lots of fun to be had watching the players try to meta round the traps, only to get an acid spraying spider in the face.

Web, D&D 5e adventure for 2+ Lvl 1-3 characters

The Undead Sheepdog

Sometimes you need to herd the players. Your adventure is a bit linear and you need get those sheep to the other side of the field. Creeping death doesn't work. It's a roleplaying game so one plucky player will still try to meta past such obstacles - killing them for interpreting your push as a puzzle isn't fair. What you really need is a sheepdog.

If you're as old as I (my sympathies), you'll remember Lassie. Her most well known trope is showing up, barking, and leading the party to deal with the problem. People trust Lassie, no one has to figure out her ulterior motives - she just brings people to the action.

My sheepdog in this week's adventure went through a few revisions till I settled on making him an old friend of one of the players. This I think is key to making an effective sheepdog. The Barbarian player did question the reliability of the guide on one occasion. But the player who was the friend of the sheepdog felt they were permitted to define the friendship: No, this guy is alright, I know him.

The adventure is a short romp escaping from a ghost ship. It was tackled by 4 melee classes. (I had to halve the wolves in the dog pen because the Barbarian was a secret Dr. Dolittle who ended up adopting one of the wolves - and add an extra shadow because I'd lost track of how munchkin our half-orc fighter had gotten. I also omitted the finders-keepers coin, that's a dick-move that should be saved for an experienced group.)

Scully and Crosby, D&D 5e adventure for Lvl 1-3 characters

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Also, one of the players ran their own homebrew fox-race. All game I just thought of their character as Sir Didymus. It's quite fun bringing these things to the table though (so long as they're not O.P. nonsense). I'm quite tempted by the blue mage sorcerer myself.

Dungeon Expansion

Hello.

I wanted a nice filtered space for my D&D stuff, so I thought I'd set up a new blog for it. The first time hosting D&D at Loading Bar I winged it (no prep, no modules). I always used to wing it, but now I'm older and I've read hundreds of books since the last time I ran a roleplaying game. I like a bit of foreshadowing. I like mysteries. And yes you can wing that but when you write out some ideas and leave them for a few days you spot opportunities to create some really cool chains of events. And then you've got more ammo, more Dungeon Master bullets to fire at the players.

My first mistake writing adventures was thinking I was going to use every bullet. And each bullet ends up dependant on the last - and now I know what railroading is. And then I found Courtney Campbell's blog and his Tricks document. A massive list of bullets, Rambo-levels of ammunition - you don't need to fire it all, just pick up something appropriate and start shooting.

So I wrote something linear (let's not confuse the newbies), yet with some sandbox moments. It's a one-shot that resulted in a fun game for 7 players. I even cut parts out because the game was running late - but it felt nice to have so much extra content to fall back on without needing to commit to it:

Dungeon Expansion - D&D5e for 2+ Level 1-3 characters