cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Having played D&D for the first time recently(despite having run and played in numerous White Wolf/WoD/etc campaigns), I find it fascinating how often DMs use pre-existing campaigns and what not. I ran into the same one at least twice! (Starting with a horse flying in the air or thereabouts.)
Is it more expected in D&D to fall back on these, or just more common that WW storytellers come up with their own things?
D&D has always been about running modules, though in earlier days the modules were small so you’d stick the ones you had together. The pre-made entire campaigns are a newer thing, relatively.
Pretty much every other game has put the effort onto the game host either because the company doesn’t have the resources to make modules or they’re inherently designed to be more about what the players want to do / your NPCs machinations / fiction first snowballing.
I also just think it’s a culture thing. My first game was Apocalypse World. I was active on the long destroyed google whatever-it-was-called hang out site when it was brand new, chatting with the creator and earliest players. It legit did not occur to me to make modules for it, no one did. The whole point was you came up with the barest scenario and then you played to find out, as was the holy mantra of the time.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
The idea of using prewritten D&D campaigns feels like anathema to me, meanwhile
Maybe it's just the places I came up in or personal biases, but I never knew anyone who used a prewritten until the recent boom
And I will use premade stuff in other games, this is a specific to D&D (and heroic fantasy broadly) feeling that I have
The first D&D modules were just cleaned-up versions of the dungeons run for D&D tournaments - and those were a thing back in the day! Usually your party would be scored on enemies slain, treasure found, various knick-knacks, and in the case of the Tomb of Horrors "how far did you get before you died". Some of these linked up together (notably Against the Giants), some of them were standalone (e.g. Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors).
So while the rulebooks were suggesting that players should make their own six-plus-levels-deep megadungeons as a kind of eternally-reusable gameplay thing, all the actually published stuff was these relatively short jaunts that you could complete in a couple sessions. Guess which became the standard?
You then also had a series of very successful modules for Basic D&D, which made sense given that... well, it was Basic D&D. Intended for beginners, to some degree, with the Basic set being packaged with first B1 In Search of the Unknown (which had rooms the DM was supposed to key themselves, because they're also learning) and later B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. The Expert set was packaged with X1 The Isle of Dread, which was a big showcase for the wilderness exploration mechanics that were a big part of the level 4-14 expansion to the ruleset.
There's something to note here, though, and it's that D&D modules initially didn't really have much of a plot to them. There might be some framing device, or some final boss, but for the most part it's just a cool dungeon you're exploring. A sandbox, to some degree.
This changes in 1982, when Tracy and Laura Hickman put out Pharaoh, the first part of the Desert of Desolation series. Now there was story, read-aloud dialogue, scripted cutscenes! They're better known for their later work, though, like 1983's Ravenloft or (in Tracy's case) co-writing the original Dragonlance novels. Needless to say, this new style was a hit! So suddenly you start to get modules that are, well, actual stories with plot points that you're meant to hit. There's some good ones here - I know people who swear by some of the later Expert series modules, for instance.
Later AD&D (and Basic) is a wild time of adventures that deal with vast metaplots, cutscenes where the player characters don't really matter because it's the GMPCs who steal the scene (and might literally be the main character of some novel), and... well, there's a lot of good ideas but there's also a lot of bad ones.
I think this might also be roundabout when some modules seemed to be written to be more read than played, and thus basically were just short novella in really funky formatting, but I'm certain that even the worst Dark Sun module (either Freedom or Arcane Shadows, probably) probably had no shortage of groups who made it through the entire thing.
(The World of Darkness had a similar obsession with advancing metaplot in their setting books, and other TTRPGs did so as well. I dunno, maybe metaplot was just the style of the 90s.)
But in comes D&D 3E, and it's "Back To The Dungeon!" Out with the plots, it's hackin' and slashin' time! By and large the now-renamed-as-"Adventures" that Wizards of the Coast put out are linear combat gauntlets and IMHO not terribly good, but you've got the occasional standout examples like The Red Hand of Doom's longer (and looser) campaign.
Next you get D&D 4E and they double down on the combat, because that's what people seemed to really like in 3E, and... well, unfortunately most of the published adventures still aren't terribly good. Tactical encounter after tactical encounter, perhaps with a brief skill challenge to spice things up before the next linearly-encountered tactical encounter.
This isn't 4E's fault, though, it's just WotC not being great at actually writing adventures. I hear good things about some of the later adventures they put out, though, like Madness at Gardmore Abbey. (Which was more of a sandbox, I guess.)
And now for D&D 5E you've got... I'm not really sure. Grand mega-adventure campaigns, with 256 pages of stuff to do? I don't know that I've heard a lot of good things about these, to be honest, and I've always been more fond of the Basic D&D formula where you've got ~36 easily-digested pages that give you a loosely-detailed setting you can run weeks of adventures in. I'm sure that people have fun with these huge books, but I've also heard of plenty of groups that stall out halfway through (many months in) because they don't actually enjoy the thing and suddenly the DM has spent $50 on a big Curse of Strahd book that... I dunno, I guess they'll just read it.
I think premade adventures help new and unconfident game masters get into it and get some practice with the whole job
it can be VERY intimidating to be the story director and all the characters other than the players if you're not already accustomed to improv roleplay and such
There's a lot of good D&D Encounters adventures for 4E, the problem is that they weren't really available unless you were running/playing at participating LGSes. I was running D&D Encounters for a while during 4E so I still have a number of them on my shelf.
Unless they're now available on DriveThruRPG or something?
I hear good things about some of the later adventures they put out, though, like Madness at Gardmore Abbey. (Which was more of a sandbox, I guess.)
I have now heard this several times.
I have it in my basement, opened but complete and unplayed, sealed in a USPS box intending to sell it because I discovered an intact copy is worth some bank nowadays.
But then I keep hearing that it's a good adventure! Which makes me kinda want to open it up and use it.
I am eternally torn.
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Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
I think premade adventures help new and unconfident game masters get into it and get some practice with the whole job
it can be VERY intimidating to be the story director and all the characters other than the players if you're not already accustomed to improv roleplay and such
I started running 5e on Roll20 during Lockdown, and pre-written campaigns gave me fancy maps if nothing else
In Ars Magica the pre-written stuff gives me a useful framework; the choices that the characters make then give inspiration for more bespoke stuff later on
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I learned a hell of a lot running a premade adventure, so I'm pretty glad I had it. Even though I didn't run it particularly well.
I’d probably like to use something pre-made now as I’m shorter on time, but I’m such a ‘yes, and’ guy that by the end of Search for the Generic Giant’s Gold or whatever they’d be firing up the solar cannon to save Samus Aran from Space Dracula.
I’d probably like to use something pre-made now as I’m shorter on time, but I’m such a ‘yes, and’ guy that by the end of Search for the Generic Giant’s Gold or whatever they’d be firing up the solar cannon to save Samus Aran from Space Dracula.
Honestly, another aspect to the whole thing is that D&D just lends itself to premade adventures in a way other games don't - and that's partly because the designers knew that they'd be publishing a lot of them, while smaller publishers probably balk at that additional cost.
So modern D&D has these strict encounters-per-day expectations, encounter design math, grid-based tactical combat that encourages buying battlemaps (complete with D&D-branded miniatures)...
Meanwhile something like Apocalypse World kind of can't have a premade adventure, because so much of it is expected to be made up on the fly by the players.
And what would a predefined "adventure" for World of Darkness even look like? No, they published settings instead, each book covering a city to go be brooding vampires in with lots of pre-made NPCs and plot hooks.
Other TTRPGs have made premade adventures, of course, but D&D's the biggest RPG in the world so obviously it's got the most. But RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Paranoia, GURPS, Shadowrun... they've all got some in their catalog.
(Also, of course, games directly inspired by D&D like 13th Age have them as well. Mind you, Eyes of the Stone Thief is much more nebulous and DIY than your typical D&D adventure.)
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Well, there are premade adventures for WoD, usually in the city books(i.e. Boston for Mage, New Orleans for Vampire), though they seem pretty involved.
One of my favorites is in the Keys to the Supernal Tarot book, which has several, i.e. the Votaries of the Throne:
They're usually vague sandboxes, i.e. 'these characters are out there doing this thing, here's what they might do', whereas D&Ds seem to have blatant step-by-step chapters laid out.
I guess the main thing that puts me off about D&D is that it doesn't feel like you get to make characters, just party members, if that makes sense.
I feel like WoD more encourages players to make personality, not just job classes, though maybe that's just how the games I've seen all go.
D&D's also a bit funky in that, well, it's quite literally 6-7 games pretending that they're actually the same game.
And I'm not just talking about game mechanics here, either. You've got divisions between dungeon crawling and more conventional heroic fantasy, you've got divisions between social-focused games vs. exploration-focused games vs. combat-focused games, you've got that very fundamental "megadungeon meant to be a forever game" vs. "small tournament dungeon meant to be cleared in an evening"... It's a bit of a big tent, in some ways, and you'll find all sorts of weird adventures put under the umbrella of D&D.
Especially once you go outside TSR/WotC's stuff and look at D&D-compatible adventures, be they published in Dungeon Magazine or the DM's Guild or under a generic "OSR" brand.
By and large, a D&D adventure is designed in one common way: a map with a bunch of keyed locations on it, and then descriptions of what's in those locations. The specifics are where the differences come in: are the locations specific plot points or are they just more sandboxy "in this 10'x10' room, there's a goblin guarding a treasure chest"? For the latter, does the adventure explicitly tell the DM how the goblin will act when a party of dangerous adventurers kick down the door, or is it left as an opening for player choice and DM improv?
IMHO the best D&D adventures are the ones that are small contained settings with lots of defined factions that the players can play off of (e.g. Jennell Jaquay's The Caverns of Thracia), and the worst ones are plot-heavy railroads with an overabundance of read-aloud text and metaplot shenanigans.
...Or just something completely nonsensical and badly written, like the infamous N2 The Forest Oracle. What the hell even happened with that one?
Seriously, read this read-aloud text about some approaching bandits and try to figure out what the fuck the author was thinking.
A group of seven men approaches. They are following the road east, and are making good time, neither tarrying nor running. Their faces are expressionless. One is dressed as a cleric of some sort, and another is dressed as a traveling drummer. The others could be peasants or serfs going from one location to another for the harvest season. Each carries some sort of weapon. It is plain that they are not soldiers by their haphazard way of walking. They do not seem to be joking loudly or singing as they advance.
I’d probably like to use something pre-made now as I’m shorter on time, but I’m such a ‘yes, and’ guy that by the end of Search for the Generic Giant’s Gold or whatever they’d be firing up the solar cannon to save Samus Aran from Space Dracula.
But Samus is Space Dracula.
Thanks for spoiling the big twist at the end of the campaign.
Well, there are premade adventures for WoD, usually in the city books(i.e. Boston for Mage, New Orleans for Vampire), though they seem pretty involved.
One of my favorites is in the Keys to the Supernal Tarot book, which has several, i.e. the Votaries of the Throne:
<pictures>
They're usually vague sandboxes, i.e. 'these characters are out there doing this thing, here's what they might do', whereas D&Ds seem to have blatant step-by-step chapters laid out.
I guess the main thing that puts me off about D&D is that it doesn't feel like you get to make characters, just party members, if that makes sense.
I feel like WoD more encourages players to make personality, not just job classes, though maybe that's just how the games I've seen all go.
That's usually a table issue. A system can certainly emphasize personality traits more and less but whether or not character comes into play depends on the scenarios a GM chooses to run, how they run them, and how the players respond.
While I'm happy to ridicule 5E all day long, as I understand it the Curse of Strahd has quite a lot of room to focus on roleplay.
I hear a lot of good things about Curse, and I also hear nothing about anything else in 5E.
Also @Polarite I want you to imagine me walking around town, standing on the end of piers, sitting the Thinker pose while muttering Samus is Space Dracula, because you’re so right.
I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight off and on (mostly off recently), and I really like it as a jumping off point, a DMing trellis for my honeysuckle bullshit.
It's nice to have the broad strokes present, some balanced encounters and pre-built areas, characters and connections. If my players go somewhere 100% unexpected I can flip to a page and start reading stuff instead of scurrying off to rapid-plan or cutting the session short. The Witchlight campaign setting is especially easy to add onto and flavor however you want due to its otherwordly nature. I've more or less seamlessly added additional factions, bosses, and encounters aplenty.
With that said, there are definitely some blank spots that DMs will need to fill in, mostly because the book's written to never assume your party will actually, you know, draw swords and fight something to the death. That's both great and horrible for good-aligned roleplayers!
Curse of Strahd is probably the best 5E campaign though. It has that otherworldly aspect like Witchlight, so plenty of opportunity for DMs to add their own flavor without players clocking it. But on top of that, it feels like a more complete setting overall, with tons of dungeons, combat encounters, and villains strewn about for players to explore at their own pace. Strahd himself is easily the best BBEG written for DnD, and part of that is the tools + guidance the writers provide for DMs to play him memorably, along with the spooky setting he commands.
I think premade adventures help new and unconfident game masters get into it and get some practice with the whole job
it can be VERY intimidating to be the story director and all the characters other than the players if you're not already accustomed to improv roleplay and such
To slightly elaborate, Lady Blackbird is both a system and an adventure in that system. The setting is the Wild Blue, which is Firefly but everybody can breathe in space, and... well, I'll let the game fill in the rest:
"Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint.
"However -- Just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.
"Even now -- Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the commander of the cruiser, Captain Hollas, runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast Cyrus Vance.
"How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?
"What dangers lie in their path?
"Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king? if they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?"
In addition to Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and Cyrus Vance, you can play the ship's ex-thief mechanic and its shapeshifting goblin pilot.
It's not a complete adventure in the sense that it gives you any details about the route they'll wind up taking to find Uriah Flint or the possible obstacles on the way, but it's an excellent one-shot/manyshot convention game.
I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight off and on (mostly off recently), and I really like it as a jumping off point, a DMing trellis for my honeysuckle bullshit.
It's nice to have the broad strokes present, some balanced encounters and pre-built areas, characters and connections. If my players go somewhere 100% unexpected I can flip to a page and start reading stuff instead of scurrying off to rapid-plan or cutting the session short. The Witchlight campaign setting is especially easy to add onto and flavor however you want due to its otherwordly nature. I've more or less seamlessly added additional factions, bosses, and encounters aplenty.
With that said, there are definitely some blank spots that DMs will need to fill in, mostly because the book's written to never assume your party will actually, you know, draw swords and fight something to the death. That's both great and horrible for good-aligned roleplayers!
Curse of Strahd is probably the best 5E campaign though. It has that otherworldly aspect like Witchlight, so plenty of opportunity for DMs to add their own flavor without players clocking it. But on top of that, it feels like a more complete setting overall, with tons of dungeons, combat encounters, and villains strewn about for players to explore at their own pace. Strahd himself is easily the best BBEG written for DnD, and part of that is the tools + guidance the writers provide for DMs to play him memorably, along with the spooky setting he commands.
I liked running Wild Beyond the Witchlight. But the encounters are not actually super balanced.
I finished Act 2 of my 5e campaign that's been largely based off the Acquisitions Incorporated introductory adventure, How Not to Host a Murder, Sleeping Dragon's Wake, and Divine Contention
One of the players said that she couldn't imagine having to come up with plot every week, so I think I've got away with using the published stuff and changing some of the names and character motivations
Now one of my players will be running a WFRP 4e campaign while I come up with Act 3
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
My partner brought over a few books for me to pour over, analyzing the graphical layout of them, as I continue to work on my own Eberron E6 project.
One such book they brought over was Andrew Kolb's Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting
I need to poke around more books for design ideas, layouts are super fun. The one problem is every time I see really really pretty books it makes me want to scrap all my layout work and start from scratch. What if I could do better!?
So, tonight was actual gameplay session 3 of beast wing. the party successfully escaped the intro adventure station Which had been attacked by pirates and are now racing to chase down the princess they were here to escort.
What they don’t know is she’s in on the kidnapping and the plan is to steal the groups ships.
The station had 3 rings around a central column and they had to make their way up through the hotel floor(where they started) through the research lab ring, and then get to the hangar on the top ring. Today was the lab ring, which was full of escaped necroptifex experiments
(basically medical nanites that, in order to avoid a grey goo situation, only try to repair willing sentient beings… with the slight defect that while they short term fill that bullet hole great, they also stop regular healing where they replaced your flesh .. so they eventually just kinda cause you to rot out long term.. defect #2 is they also interpret being dead as “willing” so the nanites also really like reanimating corpses and making undead abominations).
Right at the end, one of the players (a deer named Deer, in classic star fox style) got to do the “threat” thing and help recharge everyone’s boons by wandering off to check on an old lady he’d made friends with in session 1, leaving the party to walk into a bad pirate ambush short handed. The party’s legendary (also a pirate) captain corgi chose to eat a wound at the first opportunity to help the party escape combat because it was looking super bad and staying to fight was much worse than running away, and then once they regrouped Deer got to mark his boon to pull a big dramatic moment and walk straight up to the ambush leader and tell him to fuck off in exchange for a favour
(he’s got secret my-family-is-royalty privilege so they happily obliged)
.
We wrapped it up with them launching in their ships only to be blocked by 4 pilots, a fox, a falcon, a rabbit and a frog, while their target gets away in a transport. So next sessions going to start with their first space fight, and then they’ll be off to their first planet, which is going to be a big sandbox.
RawrBear on
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
I don't know where to put this other than here to pass it on to Lanz, but I thought she (and many others) would appreciate this. I recognize that raccoons are not tanuki, but...
My local store just got in their Bloomburrow stuff. And along with that, it appears they got in some custom playmats that are.. well, they are just great. I'm trying to figure out where they are from and what the other 3 designs are.
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
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AthenorBattle Hardened OptimistThe Skies of HiigaraRegistered Userregular
edited July 27
Okay, checked with the store owner. He said he ordered them right from the artist, so I'm still not 100% sure who did it. But it is very much a cool set.
I also got pictures of the others. They have "Daria Aksenova" on them so it might be that artist, but their online portfolio (probably NSFW) doesn't have these particular prints.
Athenor on
He/Him | "We who believe in freedom cannot rest." - Dr. Johnetta Cole, 7/22/2024
So I've been reading up on the mechanics of the 5e Druid. Not because I'm playing one (warlock 5ever) but because wild shape is the most complex class ability in the game and using it optimally in combat almost requires you to do differential calculus in your head to pick the best shape for the situation.
But looking at online discussions, most people are saying that they never use wild-shape in combat if they're any druid subclass other than Circle of the Moon. Which makes no sense to me when there's so much really strong stuff you can do with it, at least through levels 2-10 and for combats where you can wild-shape before rolling initiative. Am I out of touch or is it the children who are wrong?
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
Maybe sometimes wildshaping isn't part of the fantasy and they're more in the druid class for the plant stuff, I'm guessing.
Also, wildshape tends to limit your playstyle to 1on1 "this fight I am going to be hitting a dude and that's my contribution to the team", where being a spellcaster opens your options to affect the fight more broadly, either with buffs/debuffs, ranged or area effects.
Except for the fact that most druids are nearly always maintaining a concentration spell while wild shaping, doing something interesting. And if you're not a moon druid? Then who cares if you're only in the form for a round or two if you get to do something neat with it.
Not to mention how dismissive that broadly is of martial classes in general.
I think a lot of druid sub-classes that have an alternate usage of wild shape can most of the time get more effect using those alternate abilities in combat. Wildshape is pretty great for all druids outside of combat, arguably more so than moon druids since they want to hold onto their uses for combat.
Wild Shape gives a handy hit point buffer for tanking in melee, which I used it for back in the day
Although while my teammates were casting twin spells and multi attacks and bonus action attacks, me going "I attack once, and miss" made my contribution at high levels a touch underwhelming
Reminded me of that Iron Man 2 fight where Happy is fighting one guy as Natasha is taking out a whole corridor
Admittedly this was because a fight started while I was in a shape chosen for scouting, which brings us back to the Wild Shape being useful out of combat; I could have shifted back, but I didn't want to waste the aforementioned hit point buffer, and my enemy was also missing me so it ended up being an orc and a giant spider in a slap fight next to the main fight
During one very infrequent campaign, my wife plays a grave cleric while I'm a moon druid (the final party member is a trickster rogue). She still gets a kick out of casting spirit guardians before I polymorph her into something big like a trex then wild shape into some not quite as large and we stomp around like idiots smashing everything.
In that game we recently outwitted a chaos god, and so got to each make a wish. Because I was very careful with the wording I ended up convincing the DM to let me wildshape into Monstrosities, Dragons and more than just the 4 Elementals you get at lvl 10, all still consuming 2 wild shape uses but no other drawback besides getting DM approval first. Most of the options aren't very good yet but it's interesting looking over the possibilities as the list of beasts dwindles as my available CR climbs.
Did character generation for a new WFRP campaign last night
We've got an entertainer, boatman, outlaw, hedge witch, and me, an adviser
Thanks to the random stats I've got good Weapon Skill, Toughness and Strength as well as Intelligence, so I'm thinking childhood friend of minor noble who is currently more about roistering and boozing (I'm also only 16 so haven't had time to get real influence in court)
This might have also been informed by my recent binge of The Great, as I'm picturing Grigor, friend to Peter III of Russia
[Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
So I've been reading up on the mechanics of the 5e Druid. Not because I'm playing one (warlock 5ever) but because wild shape is the most complex class ability in the game and using it optimally in combat almost requires you to do differential calculus in your head to pick the best shape for the situation.
But looking at online discussions, most people are saying that they never use wild-shape in combat if they're any druid subclass other than Circle of the Moon. Which makes no sense to me when there's so much really strong stuff you can do with it, at least through levels 2-10 and for combats where you can wild-shape before rolling initiative. Am I out of touch or is it the children who are wrong?
Generally, only Circle of the Moon uses Wildshape for combat. Later circles (this is represented much more in the 2024 rules) use wildshape charges to fuel other subclass stuff (like stars, for example) The combat utility of wildshape is also incredibly front loaded, so if you aren't a Moon druid, it becomes even less useful in later levels.
Edit: Also also, at certain breakpoints, there are some forms that are just clearly better than others.
So I've been reading up on the mechanics of the 5e Druid. Not because I'm playing one (warlock 5ever) but because wild shape is the most complex class ability in the game and using it optimally in combat almost requires you to do differential calculus in your head to pick the best shape for the situation.
But looking at online discussions, most people are saying that they never use wild-shape in combat if they're any druid subclass other than Circle of the Moon. Which makes no sense to me when there's so much really strong stuff you can do with it, at least through levels 2-10 and for combats where you can wild-shape before rolling initiative. Am I out of touch or is it the children who are wrong?
A lot of online discussion is based on high-level white-room analyses, where Wild Shape doesn't scale effectively for non-Moon druids.
Wild Shape is absolutely useful for lower-level druids. I found the warhorse form to be particularly useful once unlocked; it has very high movement speed and a pretty decent multiattack.
Posts
Is it more expected in D&D to fall back on these, or just more common that WW storytellers come up with their own things?
Pretty much every other game has put the effort onto the game host either because the company doesn’t have the resources to make modules or they’re inherently designed to be more about what the players want to do / your NPCs machinations / fiction first snowballing.
Maybe it's just the places I came up in or personal biases, but I never knew anyone who used a prewritten until the recent boom
And I will use premade stuff in other games, this is a specific to D&D (and heroic fantasy broadly) feeling that I have
So while the rulebooks were suggesting that players should make their own six-plus-levels-deep megadungeons as a kind of eternally-reusable gameplay thing, all the actually published stuff was these relatively short jaunts that you could complete in a couple sessions. Guess which became the standard?
You then also had a series of very successful modules for Basic D&D, which made sense given that... well, it was Basic D&D. Intended for beginners, to some degree, with the Basic set being packaged with first B1 In Search of the Unknown (which had rooms the DM was supposed to key themselves, because they're also learning) and later B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. The Expert set was packaged with X1 The Isle of Dread, which was a big showcase for the wilderness exploration mechanics that were a big part of the level 4-14 expansion to the ruleset.
There's something to note here, though, and it's that D&D modules initially didn't really have much of a plot to them. There might be some framing device, or some final boss, but for the most part it's just a cool dungeon you're exploring. A sandbox, to some degree.
This changes in 1982, when Tracy and Laura Hickman put out Pharaoh, the first part of the Desert of Desolation series. Now there was story, read-aloud dialogue, scripted cutscenes! They're better known for their later work, though, like 1983's Ravenloft or (in Tracy's case) co-writing the original Dragonlance novels. Needless to say, this new style was a hit! So suddenly you start to get modules that are, well, actual stories with plot points that you're meant to hit. There's some good ones here - I know people who swear by some of the later Expert series modules, for instance.
Later AD&D (and Basic) is a wild time of adventures that deal with vast metaplots, cutscenes where the player characters don't really matter because it's the GMPCs who steal the scene (and might literally be the main character of some novel), and... well, there's a lot of good ideas but there's also a lot of bad ones.
I think this might also be roundabout when some modules seemed to be written to be more read than played, and thus basically were just short novella in really funky formatting, but I'm certain that even the worst Dark Sun module (either Freedom or Arcane Shadows, probably) probably had no shortage of groups who made it through the entire thing.
(The World of Darkness had a similar obsession with advancing metaplot in their setting books, and other TTRPGs did so as well. I dunno, maybe metaplot was just the style of the 90s.)
But in comes D&D 3E, and it's "Back To The Dungeon!" Out with the plots, it's hackin' and slashin' time! By and large the now-renamed-as-"Adventures" that Wizards of the Coast put out are linear combat gauntlets and IMHO not terribly good, but you've got the occasional standout examples like The Red Hand of Doom's longer (and looser) campaign.
Next you get D&D 4E and they double down on the combat, because that's what people seemed to really like in 3E, and... well, unfortunately most of the published adventures still aren't terribly good. Tactical encounter after tactical encounter, perhaps with a brief skill challenge to spice things up before the next linearly-encountered tactical encounter.
This isn't 4E's fault, though, it's just WotC not being great at actually writing adventures. I hear good things about some of the later adventures they put out, though, like Madness at Gardmore Abbey. (Which was more of a sandbox, I guess.)
And now for D&D 5E you've got... I'm not really sure. Grand mega-adventure campaigns, with 256 pages of stuff to do? I don't know that I've heard a lot of good things about these, to be honest, and I've always been more fond of the Basic D&D formula where you've got ~36 easily-digested pages that give you a loosely-detailed setting you can run weeks of adventures in. I'm sure that people have fun with these huge books, but I've also heard of plenty of groups that stall out halfway through (many months in) because they don't actually enjoy the thing and suddenly the DM has spent $50 on a big Curse of Strahd book that... I dunno, I guess they'll just read it.
it can be VERY intimidating to be the story director and all the characters other than the players if you're not already accustomed to improv roleplay and such
Unless they're now available on DriveThruRPG or something?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I have now heard this several times.
I have it in my basement, opened but complete and unplayed, sealed in a USPS box intending to sell it because I discovered an intact copy is worth some bank nowadays.
But then I keep hearing that it's a good adventure! Which makes me kinda want to open it up and use it.
I am eternally torn.
https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird
In Ars Magica the pre-written stuff gives me a useful framework; the choices that the characters make then give inspiration for more bespoke stuff later on
But Samus is Space Dracula.
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So modern D&D has these strict encounters-per-day expectations, encounter design math, grid-based tactical combat that encourages buying battlemaps (complete with D&D-branded miniatures)...
Meanwhile something like Apocalypse World kind of can't have a premade adventure, because so much of it is expected to be made up on the fly by the players.
And what would a predefined "adventure" for World of Darkness even look like? No, they published settings instead, each book covering a city to go be brooding vampires in with lots of pre-made NPCs and plot hooks.
Other TTRPGs have made premade adventures, of course, but D&D's the biggest RPG in the world so obviously it's got the most. But RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Paranoia, GURPS, Shadowrun... they've all got some in their catalog.
(Also, of course, games directly inspired by D&D like 13th Age have them as well. Mind you, Eyes of the Stone Thief is much more nebulous and DIY than your typical D&D adventure.)
One of my favorites is in the Keys to the Supernal Tarot book, which has several, i.e. the Votaries of the Throne:
They're usually vague sandboxes, i.e. 'these characters are out there doing this thing, here's what they might do', whereas D&Ds seem to have blatant step-by-step chapters laid out.
I guess the main thing that puts me off about D&D is that it doesn't feel like you get to make characters, just party members, if that makes sense.
I feel like WoD more encourages players to make personality, not just job classes, though maybe that's just how the games I've seen all go.
And I'm not just talking about game mechanics here, either. You've got divisions between dungeon crawling and more conventional heroic fantasy, you've got divisions between social-focused games vs. exploration-focused games vs. combat-focused games, you've got that very fundamental "megadungeon meant to be a forever game" vs. "small tournament dungeon meant to be cleared in an evening"... It's a bit of a big tent, in some ways, and you'll find all sorts of weird adventures put under the umbrella of D&D.
Especially once you go outside TSR/WotC's stuff and look at D&D-compatible adventures, be they published in Dungeon Magazine or the DM's Guild or under a generic "OSR" brand.
By and large, a D&D adventure is designed in one common way: a map with a bunch of keyed locations on it, and then descriptions of what's in those locations. The specifics are where the differences come in: are the locations specific plot points or are they just more sandboxy "in this 10'x10' room, there's a goblin guarding a treasure chest"? For the latter, does the adventure explicitly tell the DM how the goblin will act when a party of dangerous adventurers kick down the door, or is it left as an opening for player choice and DM improv?
IMHO the best D&D adventures are the ones that are small contained settings with lots of defined factions that the players can play off of (e.g. Jennell Jaquay's The Caverns of Thracia), and the worst ones are plot-heavy railroads with an overabundance of read-aloud text and metaplot shenanigans.
...Or just something completely nonsensical and badly written, like the infamous N2 The Forest Oracle. What the hell even happened with that one?
Seriously, read this read-aloud text about some approaching bandits and try to figure out what the fuck the author was thinking.
Thanks for spoiling the big twist at the end of the campaign.
That's usually a table issue. A system can certainly emphasize personality traits more and less but whether or not character comes into play depends on the scenarios a GM chooses to run, how they run them, and how the players respond.
While I'm happy to ridicule 5E all day long, as I understand it the Curse of Strahd has quite a lot of room to focus on roleplay.
Also @Polarite I want you to imagine me walking around town, standing on the end of piers, sitting the Thinker pose while muttering Samus is Space Dracula, because you’re so right.
It's nice to have the broad strokes present, some balanced encounters and pre-built areas, characters and connections. If my players go somewhere 100% unexpected I can flip to a page and start reading stuff instead of scurrying off to rapid-plan or cutting the session short. The Witchlight campaign setting is especially easy to add onto and flavor however you want due to its otherwordly nature. I've more or less seamlessly added additional factions, bosses, and encounters aplenty.
With that said, there are definitely some blank spots that DMs will need to fill in, mostly because the book's written to never assume your party will actually, you know, draw swords and fight something to the death. That's both great and horrible for good-aligned roleplayers!
Curse of Strahd is probably the best 5E campaign though. It has that otherworldly aspect like Witchlight, so plenty of opportunity for DMs to add their own flavor without players clocking it. But on top of that, it feels like a more complete setting overall, with tons of dungeons, combat encounters, and villains strewn about for players to explore at their own pace. Strahd himself is easily the best BBEG written for DnD, and part of that is the tools + guidance the writers provide for DMs to play him memorably, along with the spooky setting he commands.
To slightly elaborate, Lady Blackbird is both a system and an adventure in that system. The setting is the Wild Blue, which is Firefly but everybody can breathe in space, and... well, I'll let the game fill in the rest:
"Lady Blackbird is on the run from an arranged marriage to Count Carlowe. She hired a smuggler skyship, The Owl, to take her from her palace on the Imperial world of Ilysium to the far reaches of the Remnants, so she could be with her once secret lover, the pirate king Uriah Flint.
"However -- Just before reaching the halfway point of Haven, The Owl was pursued and captured by the Imperial cruiser Hand of Sorrow, under charges of flying a false flag.
"Even now -- Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and the crew of The Owl are detained in the brig, while the commander of the cruiser, Captain Hollas, runs the smuggler ship’s registry over the wireless. It’s only a matter of time before they discover the outstanding warrants and learn that The Owl is owned by none other than the infamous outcast Cyrus Vance.
"How will Lady Blackbird and the others escape the Hand of Sorrow?
"What dangers lie in their path?
"Will they be able to find the secret lair of the pirate king? if they do, will Uriah Flint accept Lady Blackbird as his bride? By the time they get there, will she want him to?"
In addition to Lady Blackbird, her bodyguard, and Cyrus Vance, you can play the ship's ex-thief mechanic and its shapeshifting goblin pilot.
It's not a complete adventure in the sense that it gives you any details about the route they'll wind up taking to find Uriah Flint or the possible obstacles on the way, but it's an excellent one-shot/manyshot convention game.
I liked running Wild Beyond the Witchlight. But the encounters are not actually super balanced.
One of the players said that she couldn't imagine having to come up with plot every week, so I think I've got away with using the published stuff and changing some of the names and character motivations
Now one of my players will be running a WFRP 4e campaign while I come up with Act 3
One such book they brought over was Andrew Kolb's Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting
Y'all, this is a beautiful book
So, tonight was actual gameplay session 3 of beast wing. the party successfully escaped the intro adventure station Which had been attacked by pirates and are now racing to chase down the princess they were here to escort.
The station had 3 rings around a central column and they had to make their way up through the hotel floor(where they started) through the research lab ring, and then get to the hangar on the top ring. Today was the lab ring, which was full of escaped necroptifex experiments
Right at the end, one of the players (a deer named Deer, in classic star fox style) got to do the “threat” thing and help recharge everyone’s boons by wandering off to check on an old lady he’d made friends with in session 1, leaving the party to walk into a bad pirate ambush short handed. The party’s legendary (also a pirate) captain corgi chose to eat a wound at the first opportunity to help the party escape combat because it was looking super bad and staying to fight was much worse than running away, and then once they regrouped Deer got to mark his boon to pull a big dramatic moment and walk straight up to the ambush leader and tell him to fuck off in exchange for a favour
We wrapped it up with them launching in their ships only to be blocked by 4 pilots, a fox, a falcon, a rabbit and a frog, while their target gets away in a transport. So next sessions going to start with their first space fight, and then they’ll be off to their first planet, which is going to be a big sandbox.
My local store just got in their Bloomburrow stuff. And along with that, it appears they got in some custom playmats that are.. well, they are just great. I'm trying to figure out where they are from and what the other 3 designs are.
I also got pictures of the others. They have "Daria Aksenova" on them so it might be that artist, but their online portfolio (probably NSFW) doesn't have these particular prints.
But looking at online discussions, most people are saying that they never use wild-shape in combat if they're any druid subclass other than Circle of the Moon. Which makes no sense to me when there's so much really strong stuff you can do with it, at least through levels 2-10 and for combats where you can wild-shape before rolling initiative. Am I out of touch or is it the children who are wrong?
Not to mention how dismissive that broadly is of martial classes in general.
I think a lot of druid sub-classes that have an alternate usage of wild shape can most of the time get more effect using those alternate abilities in combat. Wildshape is pretty great for all druids outside of combat, arguably more so than moon druids since they want to hold onto their uses for combat.
Although while my teammates were casting twin spells and multi attacks and bonus action attacks, me going "I attack once, and miss" made my contribution at high levels a touch underwhelming
Reminded me of that Iron Man 2 fight where Happy is fighting one guy as Natasha is taking out a whole corridor
Admittedly this was because a fight started while I was in a shape chosen for scouting, which brings us back to the Wild Shape being useful out of combat; I could have shifted back, but I didn't want to waste the aforementioned hit point buffer, and my enemy was also missing me so it ended up being an orc and a giant spider in a slap fight next to the main fight
In that game we recently outwitted a chaos god, and so got to each make a wish. Because I was very careful with the wording I ended up convincing the DM to let me wildshape into Monstrosities, Dragons and more than just the 4 Elementals you get at lvl 10, all still consuming 2 wild shape uses but no other drawback besides getting DM approval first. Most of the options aren't very good yet but it's interesting looking over the possibilities as the list of beasts dwindles as my available CR climbs.
We've got an entertainer, boatman, outlaw, hedge witch, and me, an adviser
Thanks to the random stats I've got good Weapon Skill, Toughness and Strength as well as Intelligence, so I'm thinking childhood friend of minor noble who is currently more about roistering and boozing (I'm also only 16 so haven't had time to get real influence in court)
This might have also been informed by my recent binge of The Great, as I'm picturing Grigor, friend to Peter III of Russia
Generally, only Circle of the Moon uses Wildshape for combat. Later circles (this is represented much more in the 2024 rules) use wildshape charges to fuel other subclass stuff (like stars, for example) The combat utility of wildshape is also incredibly front loaded, so if you aren't a Moon druid, it becomes even less useful in later levels.
Edit: Also also, at certain breakpoints, there are some forms that are just clearly better than others.
A lot of online discussion is based on high-level white-room analyses, where Wild Shape doesn't scale effectively for non-Moon druids.
Wild Shape is absolutely useful for lower-level druids. I found the warhorse form to be particularly useful once unlocked; it has very high movement speed and a pretty decent multiattack.
Flames of the Meta-Dragon
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short