5.5 is 5 Finding Itself

 Having flipped through the first playtest doc for D&D 5.5 (as I’m growing more certain everyone is going to end up calling the new edition), and having actually created a character with them, I think what we’re seeing is 5e finding its focus.  I’m not going to shock anyone when I say that 5e was a bit of a flailing hot mess of a game, which is perfect if you want to make it your own, including what you want and leaving out what you don’t.  But the “all things to all people” language of D&D Next is missing from One D&D.  5.5 knows what it wants to be, and what it wants to be is a story-telling machine.

 

Now, first off, I absolutely do not mean a story-telling engine like those that came out of the Forge, obsessed with replicating the structure of stories through the game mechanics.  Quite the opposite.  The models for 5.5e are the streaming games like Acquisitions, Inc. and Critical Role.  They want to give you that beloved anime series feel of friends banding together and going on a crazy journey that mixes soul-rending drama with wacky hijinks, interspersed with a seemingly random fan-service session where they all go to the beach or dress up to attend a high ball. 

 

Keeping in mind that the plural of anecdote isn't data, my experience has reinforced this.  The "kids these days" seem quite happy to toss the settings and rules and use D&D to run Narnia or Hogwarts or this really cool thing they came up with themselves that combines the Mandalorian with the Inheritance Games set in a distant corner of Tal'Dorei.  (Exactly like we played rangers with the double-barreled crossbow from Lady Hawke teamed up with a thief wielding the glaive from Krull and the psychic winged-
snake Pip, hunting color-coded ninja through the post-apocalyptic world of Thundarr the Barbarian.) 

 

The playtest doc they've released kneecaps the Rules Masters by basically banishing any sort of best-combos of race and class from 5e.  It's all about letting you play that runt orc who ran away from home to become a wizard, the tiefling rock star, the human kid abandoned as an infant and raised by fairies. 

 

I'm almost willing to bet real money that milestones become the de facto default advancement mechanic.  I'm not at all being sarcastic or mocking when I say that I'll bet they wish they could remove death from the game almost entirely, since nothing is more disruptive to a long-term storyline than PC death. 5.5 is gonna be weird, but I think most of the fans of 5e are going to love it.

A Most Dangerous Library

 

This... actually kinda exists in one of my campaigns.

One of the new cool things in the 5e MM is that green dragons don't just hoard art, they hoard *artists.*  So I had a green dragon obsessed with books.  His name was Namzugingal, but most called him Vermillion.  His library was rumored to be the largest in the world, and his slave-librarians could find the answer to nearly any question... if you were brave enough to dare Vermillion's lair to ask them.

A Great Deal: Monty Haul #1

Monty Haul is a sweet little ‘zine written for 5e D&D but with its feet firmly planted in the Old School cool. It gives off a bit of an ‘80s DRAGON vibe but is a lot more friendly with a stronger personal tone. TL;DR: some neat stuff to make spell-slingers more S&S/Lovecraftian eldritch, plus other goodies worth checking out.

Disclaimer: I backed the Kickstarter and got a sneak peek at #1 so I could help with proofreading. More than that, Mark Finn is an awesome guy I used to hang out with every chance I had when I lived in Austin (which mostly meant seeing him at conventions like ArmadilloCon). He's a literal raconteur of exceptional skill. And his brother was my therapist for a while. I think Mark rocks on and off toast.

More importantly for this discussion, Mark is a widely recognized Robert E. Howard scholar. (And yes, Amazon gives me a kickback if you buy from that link). So when he talks about Swords & Sorcery, he knows whereof he speaks. And he worked for Chessex in the ‘90s. The dude has been around and he has some stories to tell.

So, what is Monty Haul? Mostly material Mark’s created for his home game: homebrew rules, world-building, monsters, and other fun stuff that isn’t what you’re finding elsewhere.

Monty Haul #1 is dedicated to spell-slingers, specifically wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers. Because he’s writing for 5e, this means subclasses. Because it’s Mark, they’re not the usual sort of stuff. For instance, he’s got a new warlock patron, the Yellow King, who gives your warlock the power to blast enemies with mind-jarring visions of Carcosa. There’s a new sorcery origin, eldritch ancestry, that allows you to pick from three different flavors of eldritch horror (the Black Goat, which is all about chthonic deities and tentacles, the Void Dweller who are all about warping time and space, and the Deep Ones with their aquatic powers). My favorite bennie for these comes at 6th level: whenever you take physical damage, your eldritch birthright boils out from under the thin shell of your ruptured flesh, allowing you to deal greater unarmed damage to your attackers. The more hits you take, the more wrongness erupts through the holes in your skin, and the more dangerous you become. There’s also a new school for wizards, That Which Man Was Not Meant to Know, that starts off giving you some AC bonuses (due to your extreme paranoia) and ends at 14th level where the simple act of casting your spells causes psychic damage to those who can see and hear you.

There’s also a trio of “monsters” designed to plague spell-slingers specifically. I put monsters in quotes because these things have no stats; if you can see them, you can squish them pretty easily. But each is a parasite that infests the body. The ear worm is a sort of anti-babble-fish, translating the words you hear into a random language you might not understand. There’s also the mind mite (aka the brain cloud) that eats spell slots.
If you’re not into spell-slingers, there’s still some good stuff for you, including a nifty melding of the TSR-era reaction table with 5e’s social skills that I’m now using in my campaigns.

My favorite section is probably the Design Notes for a Magical City. This is not a keyed map of a magical city, but instead ideas Mark has used to make one of the city’s in his homebrew campaign more magical. This makes them very easy to slap a new coat of paint on and drop into your home campaign.

Even better, the first section is Mark’s design notes for all the different sections, the why’s and wherefore’s of the choices he’s made. Since you know why he made the choices he’s described, you’re in a better position to judge how useful his work is for your campaign and how you might want to tweak it for optimal performance at your table.

You can get Monty Haul #1 at drivethrurpg.com as a .pdf. I’m not sure if there are options for getting it in dead tree form if you missed the Kickstarter (you might contact Mark directly if that’s something you’re interested in).

Leveraging Warlocks for Campaign Greatness

Warlocks are one of the great post-TSR additions to D&D. Their relationship with their patron is much closer than that of a cleric's deity, and yet they can't take a direct hand in the campaign. Even better, they can be awesome frenimies for the PCs, power they know they shouldn't use but hey, one of them has already taken a big bite out of that forbidden fruit, so how bad can it get, right?

Someone over on Quora asked about what an Archfey could want from their warlock. And that inspired the following thoughts:

1. Why did the Archfey take the warlock on?
Maybe it was a whim of a moment, maybe it was an accident. But maybe there was something about this character that drew the attention of the Archfey. If so, that may dictate what the Archfey wants.

For a new PC, this can be the hardest way to go, because neither you nor the player may yet know what makes this actual character tick. Or, even worse, you might have a solid idea, only to see it morph and mutate when the character starts interacting with the other PCs and the world.

Still, the key to an awesome warlock experience is to make it personal, so if you think you can pull this off, do it! Look for something that capitalizes on a trait that makes this character unique, whether it’s something in their background or personality, or the people they know.

If the warlock is a PC, like all PCs they’re bound to have interesting adventures, almost as if they are fated to happen. Legend says King Arthur would not begin his New Year’s Day feast unless he’d heard of or seen some marvel. Perhaps, like Arthur, what the Archfey wants is an account of the warlock’s amazing adventures. And, if they are deemed not quite amazing enough, the Archfey will take matters into their own hands, perhaps by bribing the PCs to take on certain adventures, and then offering the PCs' adversaries some help so the warlock’s eventual triumph will be all the more exciting!

2. What does the campaign need from the Archfey?
You’ve got your world, you’ve got your villain-types and their victims, you’ve got your starting location. How are you going to put your PCs in the path of the villains? Your Archfey can help here. Maybe they want the same thing the villains want. Maybe they want something else entirely, but two things are mutually exclusive somehow. Maybe they’re just in the same neighborhood.

The nice thing about Archfey is how flexible they are. Need the PCs to focus more on the quest? The Archfey wants something related to the quest. Want to mix some romance into things? Archfey wants to help a pair of star-crossed lovers. Things getting to heavy and dramatic? Archfey wants a pig dressed up to look like the Queen of Dramatopia. An Archfey can work like a safety valve, releasing or storing up pressure as needed.

3. Being Fun-fun Silly-willy Absurd
As others have pointed out, the desires of the Archfey can at times seem a bit… off. Not quite sane. Certainly not understandable by mere mortals. To help with this, make three lists of 20 items each, one of verbs, one of adjectives, and one of nouns. Then roll on all three lists. The Archfey now wants their warlock to verb the adjective noun. The more ridiculous it sounds, the better.

Art by Sophie Anderson.

Death & Dismemberment for 5e

Yes, I'm still alive! ;p

In addition to the Stars Are Right table I posted last time, I also created a new Table of Death & Dismemberment table for the new 5e game. Like the previous versions, this stops hit point loss at 0; further successful hits just cause additional rolls on the table. When a PC is dropped to 0 hit points, roll 3d6 and consult the table.

What makes this table different? I've added psychological effects and taken some advantage of 5e's status rules. Let's check it out:

3 or less: Your character is dead!

4: Your character has lost their leg. Move at half-speed until it is replaced; a wooden peg-leg allows you to move at your normal speed -5’. Your character is unconscious until they are restored to positive hit points.

5: Your character has lost a hand. They are unconscious until restored to positive hit points. So long as they still retain one hand, they can still cast spells and wield weapons.

6: Your character is grievously wounded. If they are not stabilized within 3 rounds, they will die. It takes one action to stabilize; any magical healing that brings the character’s HP total to at least 1 also stabilizes the character.

7: Your character loses an eye. They have -1 on all ranged attacks until the eye is restored. However, their scarred visage also gives them +1 on intimidation checks. They remain unconscious until they are restored to positive hit points.

8: Your character is physically scarred beyond the ability of healing magics less than Regeneration to remove. This will effect your use of social skills, but exactly how will depend on the situation. This character will remain unconscious until restored to positive hit points.

9: Your character is emotionally scarred by their near-death experience. They are now frightened (PHB page 290) by the creature/spell/type of person who dealt the near-mortal blow. This fear can be removed by a Greater Restoration spell or other magics or special abilities that remove or negate fear effects. The character is also unconscious until they are restored to positive hit points.

10: Your character is knocked out and will remain unconscious until they are restored to positive hit points.

11: The weapon your character is wielding is shattered! They remain at 1 hit point and can stay in the fight… for now. If your character isn’t weilding a weapon or that weapon is magical, they are instead knocked out (see 10 above).

12: Your character takes a grievous wound to the leg. They are still conscious, but at 1 hit point and can only move at a speed of 5’. Any healing magic restores normal movement.

13: Your character’s armour is battered by the attack. Your AC suffers a -2 penalty and will take one day and 10% of the cost of a new set of armor to repair. Your character is still in the fight with 1d4 hit points. If your character is not wearing armor, they are at 0 hit points and unconscious until restored to positive hit points.

14: Your character takes a nasty blow to the head. They remain in the fight with 1d4 hit points, but they lose one spell slot (player’s choice). Spell slots are regained after a long rest (or a short rest for warlocks) as normal.

15: The attack leaves your character stunned until the end of their next turn (PHB page 292). They otherwise stay in the fight; roll a single hit die to see how many hit points they have.

16: The brunt of the attack is absorbed by your gear. Lose one potion. If you have no potions, lose 1d4 pieces of mundane equipment. You stay in the fight with 4 + your CON bonus hit points. (If you have no gear at all, roll 2d6 on this table.)

17: You get blood, mud, or some other icky fluid in your eyes. You are blinded until the end of your next turn (PHB page 290). Stay in the fight with 4 + your CON bonus hit points.

18: You experience a surge of adrenaline! Roll half your max hit dice and regain that many hit points. If you’ve already rolled this result in this fight, then you are unconscious at 0 hit points.

First off, yeah, this is an insanely forgiving table. It's far easier to die using the RAW of 5e than it is on this table. (Though you can die from just a single roll, which you can't do in the RAW.) And yet, I had one player voice misgivings about it; the Table of Death & Dismemberment continues to work it's old black magic. ;)

This table interacts more with the rules than previous versions and also creates more ongoing effects (for low-to-mid level characters; high-level characters will almost certainly have the spells needed to banish long-term effects, but they also have the spells necessary to mitigate death, so...)

It hasn't been used "in the field" yet, but I'm looking forward to how this shakes things up. If I change it, I may add more ongoing psychological effects a la Darkest Dungeons. If you've got some suggestions for sexy-ing this up, don't hesitate to let me know.

Art is The Wounded Gaul in the Musei Capitolini.

PC Complexity in 5e

So one of my players asked, "What's a good class for beginners?" This is 5e, with lots of classes, so the game ramps slowly to keep you from being swamped with options. That said:

Fighters are still the best if you want simplicity. You'll have a few bonuses to keep track of that apply under certain conditions, but mostly what you get is lots of hit points.

Monks probably come next in complexity. You'll acquire points that you can spend on one-shot cool abilities, like making extra attacks or movement.

Rogues are probably next in complexity. Rogues have the ability to take extra actions and get bonuses to their attacks under certain conditions. If you're prone to analysis paralysis, you might find rogues easier than monks. On the other hand, if you have trouble keeping track of what's going on around your character, or remembering that under certain conditions you get special goodies, you might find the monk simpler.

Barbarians have a few abilities, like rage, that trigger a number of bonuses all at once. They also have some cool abilities that, like rogue abilities, only trigger under certain circumstances. That said, if you can keep on top of range of things that change when you turn you abilities off and on, the barbarian class can feel pretty simple to play. For organized people they can be even simpler than the monk and rogue.

Rangers, like rogues and barbarians, have conditional powers that kick in when the situation is right (like when facing a favored enemy or in a favored terrain). They also have a few spells.

Warlocks are probably the simplest of the spell-slinging classes to play, especially if you build them right. It's easy to create a warlock whose abilities are always on (for instance, always being able to read any writing, or always being able to detect the presence of magic). They also have much shorter spell lists. You might even be able to build a warlock who's less complex than a barbarian.

Paladins are more complex than warlocks. You've got your martial abilities, your spells, your divine powers, plus abilities that are always on. Since some powers are just like others with small tweaks, paladins are not for people who hate paying attention to details.

Sorcerers are a big jump up in complexity. They have shorter spell lists, but they also have points they can use to modify their spells; increasing the range and duration, for instance.

I think bards come next. Bards come with lots of options for cool things they can do. Do you inspire your friends, cast a spell, distract the enemy, or heal the wounded? On the other hand, you'll always have something cool you can do. Not recommended for folks who suffer from analysis paralysis, they are perfect for people who like a wide menu of options to pick from.

Wizards are technically less complex mechanically than paladins, in my estimation, but the range of spells you can cast is the broadest of any class. Wizards are a great choice for players who have excellent memories or who don't mind flipping through the books to check on the details of a spell.

Finally, the class I consider the most complex is the cleric. You've got the largest number of spells to pick from (especially at lower levels), plus additional abilities dictated by your pantheon. There's a lot of accounting with the cleric since you're tracking not just your spells but also your "channel divinity" powers. And your more likely to run across spells that are cast as reactions or bonus actions.

The druid is like unto the cleric, especially once you start picking from among the various beasts you can turn into. Do you want the wolf who gets a bonus to attack when beside an ally, or giant spider who can climb walls, or the tiger who gets a special pounce attack?

All that said, one of 5e's virtues is that it ramps up slowly. It dribbles out the complexity over time, allowing you to digest each piece before adding another. So if you really want to play one of the more complicated classes, I say go for it. It might require a bit more effort on your part to create tools to help you get the most out of your PC, but better that, I think, than a character that bores you. :)

5avnica: OMGWTFOSRDIY

Well, this was unexpected. People have been yakking about crossing the M:tG and D&D streams since WotC consumed TSR. While both games involve high-magic fantasy universes, there’s never really been much overlap between them. And it’s no mystery why. M:tG is a competitive (usually one-on-one) game based on a complex, multi-state version of rock-paper-scissors. D&D is a cooperative game built around niche protection.

I could go on and on about how the five-sphere structure of M:tG magic poorly maps with D&D magic. I wish 5e’s magic system was as atmospheric and evocative as M:tG’s, but to bring them together would mean a serious overhaul of the 5e schools and how they work. I don’t expect them to do this. I expect them to gloss it and make handwavy noises about Green magic being analogous to druids and rangers while White is cleric and bard magic, if that much. That’s kind of a shame, because the ten guilds of Ravnica are based on really clever pairings of the colors, and that, I suspect, will get shoved into the background. Oh, they’ll still talk about the culture and resources and modes of the guilds, they just won’t touch much on the wellsprings of those things.

But what they are talking about doing really caught my attention. Mike Mearles, at about 5:35 in this video, says:

And then what’s really fun, what I think is the real interesting thing that the book is trying to pull off, is that the Dungeon Master looks at the players, looks at the guilds they’ve selected, and then we give you an entire adventure and campaign building system based on the guilds. You can look at the guilds the players have selected, and the book has suggestions for good adversarial guilds. Then each guild gets a section on building adventures that are driven by it.

Sound familiar? This looks very much like it’s taking a page from David McGrogan’s Yoon-suin the Purple Land, Zak’s Vornheim, Kiel’s The Hell House Beckons, Kowolski’s Scenic Dunnsmouth and, maybe to a lesser extent, Jacob Hurst’s Hot Springs Island book. Though I think the comparison to Yoon-suin is the strongest; this is an adventure and campaign-building set focused on the guild conflict of the setting.

This is an adventure book, from WotC, that has no plot.

The plot has been replaced by an “adventure and campaign building system” that guides the DM in crafting and improvising a bespoke experience for their players based on the choices the players make.

Is your mind blown yet?

The only thing that could make this more OSR/DIY is if they’d set the damned thing in the City-state of the Invincible Overlord.

Whither Weather?

Over on the GeePlus, Steven Menteer asks: How do you make weather meaningful both in terms of story and game mechanics?

He’s asking this in the 5e group, but I’m going to answer mostly generically here. Story-wise:

1. Weather Reflects the Story: dark, heavy clouds hang oppressively over the lands of the tyrannical evil baron. Mischievous autumn winds catch up the motley leaves in a wild and playful dance through the streets of the halfling village. For miles around the dragon’s lair, the land is barren, the wells dry, the creeks choked with dust, and even the warmth of the sun is sucked away by a persistent haze, until only a dull, bloody glow permeates the veil of dust.
2. Weather as Antagonist: this can be implied, as in the stories of Jack London, or some degree of literal, as in Caradhras in The Fellowship of the Ring or the darkness in Veins of the Earth. Nature is trying to defeat you somehow and the weather is one of its tools to do so. Passes will be snowed in, damp wood refuses to light or only allows weak, smoky fires, deep fog hides the movements of enemy troops, ice breaks underfoot, rocks or even entire trees fall on you, snow and mud reveals your tracks and slows your pace, pollen clogs your nostrils and stings your eyes, gales howl or winds refuse to blow and becalm your ship… The possibilities are endless here.
3. Weather as a Weapon: like above only possibly more limited. Lots of “epic” critters have Regional Effects they can invoke along these lines, such as the kraken’s control weather ability and the chilly fog or swirling blizzards that surround a white dragon’s lair. Druids and other spell-slingers can also mold the weather with their spells aggressively.
4. Weather that Marks the Passage of Time: spring rains, muggy summer nights, crisp autumn evenings and icy winter mornings help set the scene and let your players know that they’re exploring a living, breathing world. And you don’t need to stick with the standard weather patterns either. You can have exaggerated weather patterns (“Winter is coming.”) or more extreme weather patterns (dry vs. rainy season of the Serengeti, tornado season in the Great Plains, the monsoons of India and Arizona, etc.) and the cultural events that surround them.

As for rules, 5e makes this pretty easy. Even if you don’t use the exhaustion rules on page 291 of the PHB, it’s easy to include the effects of weather as advantage or disadvantage on a roll. Heavy rain or howling winds or smothering fog impede your perception checks. Rain or snow can obscure footprints. Strong winds can push arrows and javelins off target or diminish their effective range. Being forced to sleep in the open while bands of cold rain sweep over the moors could prevent the PCs from enjoying the benefits of a long rest. If you’re feeling really nasty, persistent rain could soak the PCs belongings, ruining maps or mildewing spell scrolls (a survival check could dictate how well the PCs protected their belongings from the insidious damp).

That all said, I probably wouldn’t invoke rules on weather unless it served your game. This sort of thing is a no-brainer in survival-focused Old School play, but if you’re all about the super-heroic epic conflict, I’d probably not even bother with the weather except as set-dressing unless it was actively being involved in things by some power interested in what the PCs were doing or attempting to thwart. Weather-as-nuisance is a thing that happens in real life and totally fits when the PCs are trying to scrape a living from a harsh and uncaring world. Weather-as-nuisance is just annoying when the PCs are all about thwarting the Arch-lich’s plans to replace the High Queen with a transformed red dragon right in the middle of her coronation ceremony.

Art by Pierre Auguste Cot.