#142. Fans Notice D&D Beyond Differences in Vecna: Eve of Ruin! | Eldritch Lorecast | DnD 5e

this week on the ELD L and then what are we even doing here what are we doing here what are we doing here Dale the 2024 core books are on their way let's just speak in veiled terms just don't mess that up don't make the game so it's unplayable that was all I'm asking will I be watching when it's happening at 7 a.m. not a chance the D and D Beyond version of VNA Eva ruin has more art than the book does fundamentally changed premise of the Furby this is the news that we need his Chris cuck he just lost7 billion or something like that a media production company that you bought for a hundred gazillion dollars and sold for a buck 250 the Indies had its fair share of MMOs that dwindle and dwindle dwindle as they're you know put on life support I don't I don't mean to be ragging on Chris Cox but AI smells so much better than my players that right now right now all right folks Benjamin Burns is um otherwise MH occupied we've all Ben burned out he's on Ben burned out that's a good line it is sa for for the real yeah save that for this okay here we go ready ready ready three a two a one hello and welcome to this week's episode of the eldrich lacast I am not Ben burn I am sea mwin here as always with James hake and Dale Kingsmill we are the number one podcast in all the Realms we are so number one that we may actually be 1,111 that's how number one we are that's pretty number one the 2024 core books are on their way what is one of the two or three biggest things that you want from those core books when they come out I want a dungeon Masters Guide that I refer to somewhat regularly and I'm trying to check my bias here because I was a lot newer to the game when I was playing Third Edition but when I was in Third Edition there were all sorts of things in the DMG that I went to all the time they had trap rules that were really robust actually let me amend my answer I want a DMG that has really robust traps in it let's just put a put a stake in the ground right there 5B traps I appreciate the effort they are not useful to me in any way so let's get you know let's get five pages of traps that I can use every single session if I wanted to in that game so it's the Trap Master's guide is what you're looking the Trap Master's guide and you know what that's one might say that's even half of what a dungeon is if your dungeon isn't at least 50% traps you're doing it wrong you can't have a death trap dungeon without the death and The Traps you know we could call that book The Trap Master and puzzle Masters Guide a dungeon is many things and if we don't have all the stuff that's in the dungeon within the dungeon Master's guide then what are we even doing here what are we doing here what are we doing here Dale when you think about it it is pretty wild that there isn't just like a full chapter of the DMG that is just example puzzles and riddles to use I know we live in an internet age but like I I also would just gain utility from that because I love riddles and I want to I want to puzzle myself with riddles at at any opportunity just give me a lots of riddles my answer is much more boring than that and much less much less useful I just want a ranger class that is good that serves the ranger fantasy just does it simple good that's what I want all I want is it's the hypocritic oath right it's Do no harm it's you've got a great game you've got fans you've got people that love playing it just don't mess that up don't make the game so it's unplayable that that was that was all I'm asking I always knew that my job was really similar to my doctor friend we do the same thing really we're saving lives same basically yeah healing Healing The Sick and saving lives so I'm going to flip the question around then and say what are the biggest thing or things that you don't want from the 2024 core [Music] books I don't want complexity for complexity's sake I came to this while I was doing a deep dive of the the dagger Heart play test rules they're 1.4.1 point2 their newest play test rules um and I I was I was going through a lot of sort of Big Picture game design thoughts while I was going through it because like like we talked about a week or two ago that game has a two-hit role and a damage role and you know this extra step for damage mitigation right it's more complex than D andd systems but I found that I liked the purpose of that added complexity right it does it's it's more complicated but it makes me have more fun while I'm doing it potentially um and so we're seeing things like weapon Mastery and other you know bits of design showing up in the new 2024 rules right the players handbook has all this weapon Mastery stuff as we've seen through all these Unearthed arcas you know I have not play tested those rules very significantly or at least you know I'm playing a druid in my 2024 on earth DC play test game and I just sort of pray that those rules make make gameplay more fun it's not just another thing because we said we wanted more stuff yeah I really just don't want um bookkeeping feels like the wrong word homework I don't want there to be too much homework you know when when you're sitting down to make a character for a one shot I don't want that feeling of like oh no I have to choose spells oh no I have to go through and choose my skill proficiencies I want cut through that a little bit let's just get to the meat get to the fun straight away that's what I'm hoping for all right so you both took my answers I had I don't want a more complicated game and I don't want a game that's harder for new players and game Masters to pick up and run we'll see we'll see what happens we we saw in the play test packets that they were adding certain bits such as weapon Mastery and assuming that they do make it to the final book it is it is really just one more thing for new players to oh I just want to play a fighter I just want to play a fighter okay here's a fighter and oh don't forget you can do this and don't forget you can do that and oh you use a mace so don't forget that you can knock back an opponent 5et or knock them prone my worry like James says is all that Sound and Fury signifying so little in the in the outcome of the stories that come out of this game and who are we serving as as we move further and further into roleplaying game Zeitgeist that that people are seem to be coming to the game is it that five- foot push because you're using this bludgeoning weapon or is it the Grand Story that you can tell I don't know part of me is like but the game is the game that needs to be fun it needs to draw players but part of me is just like instead of teaching people how to play the game Let's teach people how to tell stories and let's teach people what we love about sharing narratives with each other because that's where a lot of games fall down you get so many DM saying oh I started and my game was so fun and then everyone just sort of tailed off what happened that's the sort of thing that is hard to teach but if you could teach game Masters that part that storytelling and engagement part it would be so nice this is not the point you were trying to make Sean but when you mentioned pushing five feet every now and then I have this thought when I read you know a feet or a feature or something like and you can push the creature up to five feet I always think would this feature be better if it were 30 feet right like if I like if it were like in Dragon Ball where you know a guy gets punched and go you know 5050 feet away that's big and it's splashing it's super heroic and it kind of fits like tier three maybe even tier 2 DND Play It's because like it's it's the same sort of design ethos that took away a bunch of situational plus ones from 5B right and replaced it with a more impactful uh mechanic Advantage disadvantage and I go back and forth all the time would it make those little pushes more useful well it would definitely make them more useful make them more powerful but would it make would it make it feel better would I be more likely to take those things from a narrative point of view even if I was still playing it on theater of the mind you know if you've got a if you've got a GM that is very narrative first pushing five feet when you're kind of in the region of a cliff that you can push someone off of is effectively identical to a push of 30 feet DM Rollings is in chat saying pretty much what I was thinking which is that 5 feet is really far if you think about it physically practically but on the Battle Board it's only one square so it doesn't feel like it's it is a weird space weird habit where we're like we know that one square one inch is 5 feet but it doesn't feel like 5 feet when your when your mini is filling up that entire square that entire square is meant to represent you doing this then it's kind of um I don't know everything gets warped a little bit everything gets a little strange and and that 5et even 10 feet becomes so situ that it's like in real life if you can shove someone 10 feet then that feels like a huge deal but unless you are on like I don't know the bridge of kazad Doom in game it's not GNA necessarily come up that much yeah you ever overlaid a five- foot grid over a real life Castle's floor plan right oh no unusable there are videos out there where it shows people like fighting from 5et away or in those grids and it's so ridiculous looking like that you have to run up and then run back to actually do anything but what what the five foot push does is it forces game Masters to say okay if this is going to matter then I need to put things around that will then do important things oh you can push them five feet I need to put a cliff I need to put a fireplace I need to put something and that's just one more piece of cognitive work that a game master needs to do now if I remember correctly mcdms game they have a lot of that pushing but there's damage at the end of it at first I was like okay cool yeah that that that's good that makes it a little more impactful because in most of these games hit points is what important to the game so you have to take away hit points as well as push and then part of me was like still is that enough is is is the pushing and the knocking and the hitting and the pinballing still worth narratively the the uh the weight that the game gives it and there's no right answer it's just what you prefer I just I think of the children I think of the children and and what they love and it's not pushing five feet standing there with their GRL balls please please man noet more well all of this leads to our first little bit of dues today which is the Players handbook preview we're recording on Monday starting on Tuesday and Lasting the entire week Wizards of the Coast is going to be revealing slash has revealed parts of the players handbook there is a chart that we are going to go by here that you can see by going to YouTube or various sites and they say that on Tuesday they're going to give us a players handbook everything you need to know a weapon Mastery apparently it is in there and character Origins talks on Wednesday they're going to look at the fighter on Thursday they're going to look at the Paladin and on Friday they're going to look at the Barbarian and all of those Wednesday Thursday Friday it's 9:00 am Pacific time and on Tuesday it starts at 7 AM Pacific uh daylight time and that's at youtube.com DND Wizards well the first thing I noticed D is they don't have the ranger in there I think they're they're frightened they don't they're afraid of me are you going to be watching this with baited breath let's just speak in veiled terms I may have seen some things and some things that might be revealed this week I'm excited for people to see your vagueness is well taken Dale Kingsmill vague but evocatively excited about DND 5.5 print the headline what I'm saying is I don't need to watch with baited breath but I'm I'm gonna be watching everyone else will I be watching Sean I already forgot when it's Happ happening at 7 a.m. not a chance I will be cozy in bed wrapped up in my blank heads asleep but I will probably watch the VOD as soon as I'm up yeah I want to know what's happening I'm G I'm gonna buy those new books uh and maybe I'm jumping the gun on a future question but uh and I'll start playing with the new rules when they come out I mean I I want to play the latest version of DN D I'm I'm probably always going to be playing the latest version of D and D unless I have a good reason to play otherwise this update to 5e seems close enough to the current 5e that we have that I really see no reason to go back and play 2014 5e in the way that I would go back and play fourth edition or ad andd are you currently in a regular 5e game yes um I'm running one I'm actually converting the dragon Heist game that I'm running right now to dagger heart because I want to play test that game and I'm playing in a game that James Wyatt's daughter is running using the une or canas I was running current 5e game that uh has stagnated and I recognize that is largely my own fault uh with being busy with life and other things you know things other than life but uh it still feels as though I am currently running a 5e game even though it has been literal months I'm I'm definitely going to be doing that pick and choose situation where I go I like this particular class in 5.2 or whatever you want to call it um and so that's the if if you want to play X class play this version if you want to play this class we'll be running with this version because I already kind of do that I'm so I'm so Homebrew heavy that I tend to like hand players my own folder of printed out versions of of Rewritten classes anyway so it's not like any skin off my nose to just kind of fit in the the stuff that I want from the old Edition and the stuff that I want from the new new addition and kind of just make players choose between those um that works for me that's how I roll as the kids might say as the kid said in 1990 as the kid said in in 1992 the year before my birth but I I fully grasp that it's like for a lot of people this kind of Arata more than new addition must be really frustrating because it is a weird thing to be like here you go it's not that different it's different enough that it might cause you problems but it's not so different that you'll want to draw a huge distinction between the two of them in 10 years time yeah I'm in the strange position where I'm running 5 game but it's it's a citadel the Unseen sun and so we're using a lot of Ghost Fire material subclasses Transformations and so on so it was sort of already a bastardized version of 5 not saying that ghost fire a bunch of bastards or anything but uh we are though but but we are and so then I I didn't know what I was going to run after that VNA the the new VNA book came out and it almost fits perfectly from going from Citadel the Unseen sun to jump right into that a world spanning Adventure but then I was like but that's going to be a 20204 book but then if I want to move all this ghostfire stuff to 2024 I'll have to have them redo their characters plus redo ghostfire stuff now I'm always up for a good redesign uh as you know so it's it's sort of I'm in this limbo of what do I want to do and I'll probably just crawl into my desk and cry a sensible course of action this is strange because I'm literally scooping myself here he's getting scooped I'm mastering dungeons we have an absolutely wonderful Discord Community the lore cats are great don't get me wrong but the the folks at D mastering dungeons they're they're like feeding us news and feeding us takes and and it's great and they put together something that I haven't seen out there talked about and I'm surprised because usually people are all over this and if there's anything even the slightest bit to complain about it will be out there but what they found was speaking of VNA Eve of ruin the material in D and D Beyond does not match the material in the published book oh not words right now that that anyone has seen But the art the dean dond version of VNA EV of Ruin has more art than the book does there is a long list of mostly NPC art that is in D and D beyond that is not in the book and so we were like weeing Taos and I were like could this possibly be true and I had done the digital bundle so I had the digital I went to my book and I'm like sure enough our our Discord pointed out that all of this art was not in the book that was on D and D Beyond which prompted Taos to write to Wizards of the Coast to their customer support to say is this known was this known beforehand did you plan to let people know that the D and D band version might have more art than the regular version for me it's not a huge deal for me if the words were different I would be on the war path uh but for people that really dig the art and buy it mostly for art this is something that's sort of important to know good to know what what do yall think about that because we're getting into a world now where the digital is going to be different than print it is interesting because it's like simultaneously I understand why the art might vanish from a print version you know if you're if you're trying to stick to sort of a page count I can see how that would happen but at the same time it does feel like the print books are a more visual Medium as in if you're buying the print books you're buying it because it is a a beautiful item more likely than you're buying it because of practicality um so it is kind of an interesting choice and at first I was like oh maybe they just filled out the digital version with you know kind of nonspecific artwork that they just had in the archives just Chuck it in there to keep things it visually interesting as you're scrolling through but if there if it's NPC art that feels kind of specific and bespoke from what I know about book production is that there's kind of two ways to put a book together Wizards does it one way and it kind of it caught me off guard when I started working with ghostfire because they do it another way it's all about the order in which the graphic design and the art like commissioning happens right in some projects the text of the book is locked it's put into a graphic design format and then you kind of find where there are holes in the text right because you want to align text so you know new information starts Pages whenever you can and stuff like that and then however large those holes are you're like okay well this is exactly as much art as we need D D D D D we'll commission it to fill these holes and that has the advantage of being uh highly cost effective but it comes the drawback of making the time from the just production time longer the other way is to estimate right we want the book to be 320 pages long that comes out to an estimate of this many thousand words and this many you know quarter half and full piece Pages full page pieces of Art and then when you start puzzling it all together every now and then you will find that there's you know there's too much of one thing and so you have to excise it typically when you're doing this process it's text that gets excised because it's much less expensive to throw away a little bit of text than it is to throw away a little bit of art but sometimes the art does good exercise either because it's not quite what they wanted and it's good to you know they didn't really need it in there anyway and so it goes goes into like this slush pile this art graveyard that can be pulled on whenever there's a project that all of a sudden comes up short on Art and hey maybe we have something that works back in the graveyard let's just bring it back in necromancy a little bit of art necromancy but not in that horrible Abomination to life AI sort of way um this is ethical art necromancy and but and of course in a situation like this the artist gets paid full price anyway that's a cost that the the publisher eats but I've never seen it done this way where art that has sort of been slushed winds up making its way into a different Edition right the digital Edition and it makes me wonder well will this be a trend going forward uh it doesn't seem to bother me NPC art is very hard to pull out of a an art graveyard because it's very specific so it makes total sense that it's NPC art getting reused this way the the difference of Art in additions being different does not bother me much at all but what does give me pause is the fact that no one told us about this right there's no patch notes there's no there's nothing indicating hey this this version differs in this way from the other version because eventually one can imagine the text may change and if text changes between versions yeah well and will we've seen it already right yeah I mean we've seen it with AATA uh you can easily change the text on D and D Beyond and fix things the book it's harder since it's in your home yeah they have to send out they have to like commission Santa's elves and it's a whole thing they come in in the dead of night yeah Hasbro North Pole the north pole division yes yeah and you know when Jeremy Crawford was doing Sage advice all the time we would see those irata updates release his PDF saying hey this got changed to this if you want to print out this page and stick it in you know paste it into the back of your player's handbook you can do that that I don't think I've seen a sage advice like that in a long time years has it happened and I've just missed it I don't think so I I don't think so yeah I think uh that was replaced with oh a new addition new wish Edition there's your Sage advice right there MH the next bit of news I actually I'm very excited to get James and Dale uh talking about Hasbro CEO and former president and CEO of Wizards of the Coast Chris Cox did an interview with Fortune Magazine and I watch these with Glee because I love corporate speak and how absolutely uh innan and counter reality it is but it also teaches us a little about what the executives think investors want to hear versus what Executives think players and and fans want to hear so I want to ask the questions that Fortune Magazine asked Chris Cox and I want to ask both of of you I just I need people to understand I was reading excerpts of this interview to my sister last night and my favorite bits were bits like I feel that we have uh fundamentally changed the premise of the Furby this is the news that we need Furby is back Furby's back baby meet the furets the headline was also wild they didn't pull any punches they were like here's Chris he just lost7 billion or something like that it was the gist of it was hey y'all aren't doing so hot uh let's ask some questions about this uh movie production or you know media production company that you bought for a hundred gazillion dollars and sold for a buck 250 uh let's talk about that yeah let's let's talk about that and uh but then they later they got to some questions relevant to D and fans uh players especially such as a question as this let's talk about Dungeons and Dragons a Hasbro game revered by countless Geeks how do you Revitalize a decades old product let's talk about D and D let's talk about you and me how do you Revitalize a decades old product well you want to bring new blood into the player base the sort of overall popularity of a game will concentrate more and more and more if there's no new player acquisition you see this with a lot of MMOs like well D and D online for example never winter D and's had its fair share of MMOs that dwindle and dwindle dwindle as they're you know put on life support to sustain a ever and Smalling player base we can see rules updates of course generally when they're done well you maintain the player base that you had and add new people to it because it's easier to start at issue one than it is to start at you know Spider-Man issue 30 and you might piss off some old school fans if you revamp your addition too hard but that's the needle uh that wiards is trying to thread right now so makes sense what else might you do you might try and make a game more appealing to a broader audience through the type of content you publish um I think that they've been doing that in many ways I think it's it's not just good ethics but also good business to practice a certain amount of uh uh diversity within your art and within your characters and things like that I feel like there's um a an element to which you you look at what are the possible gateways right like if if you're trying to expand the player base of this form of of Play Because Chris Cox keeps saying our our core our core thing is play and that's where you meet toys and games um good for him um so it's feels like that might have been an easier conclusion to come to but all right um but you know you've got these different Avenues of to play okay so what what are the gateways that might grab people people who like board games might want to start playing D and D so maybe we start targeting that we make some some tie-in products that are D and D in board games that can lead people into playing the ttrpg because we already do board games we already have those you know Avenues of creation and distribution maybe we look at the video game sector see what play people are getting into there things like World of Warcraft and boulders gate and see how we can create that Avenue make these make these Pathways easier to lead between uh backwards and forwards between these different types of products that we make and that we have sort of our our you know fingers in the pie um and I I feel like I don't I don't mean to be ragging on Chris Cox but it's so funny reading his answer because he just sort of says from from where I'm sitting it looks like his answer is critical role exists question mark question mark question mark profit and then he says at the end 40% of our player base is women and there's no follow through on why he said that what's the so what what's the the okay so what's the action plan like he just says 40% of our player base is women I'm like neat yeah and and you know that if I if I were in the role of answering that question officially I would say to the guy uh it was a guy who was asking the questions uh it's already done it's already revitalized it's it's already there we don't have to it has been it has been revitalized there are so many more people playing than ever there are so many more different kinds of folks playing than ever it's revitalized it's done its work there already now we just need to Shepherd It Forward uh which leads me to the next question that I want to ask or was asked is the stereotype about D andd players being socially awkward shrew and Chris said I don't claim to be the biggest social butterfly in the world but over the last eight years I probably made more new friends playing D and D than I have since College uh and that's not supposed to happen in your 40s it's a great way to connect with people and it's very social I mean points to him for saying it's a very social game because it is it is it's such a bizarre um I don't know whether it's whether misconception is the right word but there is such a stereotype of this is an antisocial game in kind of in a similar way but but different to um to video games you know oh this is an antisocial Pastime but actually if you're there with your you know Guild on wow you are engaging in a social activity you are you are playing with other people um but even more than that if you're playing D and D it is an inherently social experience um so I'll pay that I'll pay that for him at least staking that flag that's not a phrase that's not a saying staking planting a flag yeah yeah I don't know where this came from I everyone is awkward socially I I think people have a feeling that there are some huge number of people out there who are like the 80s cool kids uh you know in the high school TV or mov they're all just like they just walk in and everyone's like woo that no one's like that there might be like 0.00001% of the world like that just walk into like a local Diner or grocery store or anywhere in public everybody's awkward everybody James you were at a event this weekend yes yes I was at the critical rooll live show episode 98 of uh of the Bells Hells campaign at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles huge event they sold out the Greek pretty much and you know I I couldn't tell you for sure how many thousand people fill that theater but damn it was a lot of people and there was an enormous like spectrum of people who were very you know California put together social butterfly type and people who were very OB who were sort of the stereotypical DND ner ner who were there on their own and you know weren't really socializing with anyone uh other than uh whoever came with them but for the most part nine out of 10 interactions that I had would be someone who I'd never met before we did not know each other in any way but if we saw something we loved about the other person whether it was a cosplay uh Slash outfit or like a uh a thing that they brought with them we overheard them talking with their friend about something and just like in a second conversation was struck up because the very Baseline of human social interaction is commonality commonality or exception and if you can strike up a conversation with someone and get animated and want to communicate with people rather than being inherently antisocial which I think very few people are we may be awkward but we're not antisocial uh then that's that's the problem of communication it's about finding commonalities and things that excite you and boy there has I have almost never seen outside of a gaming con a bigger Crucible of people who are excited about one particularly nerdy thing all in one place before uh which is just a hot bit it's a petri dish of social interaction there you know it's so interesting you say that you know this this sort of Bedrock is is commonality and it's so true because you know what reading this interview it feels so socially awkward and I think a lot of that comes down to that lack of commonality it feels like you've got this guy from a finance magazine who's been told to talk to the Hasbro guy and he's like so you make toys I guess question mark and Chris Cox is coming in looking really you know self-conscious and going yeah we make toys yeah and our big problem was we stopped making toys and started trying to make movies oh my gosh there's oh God sorry I know it's not what we're talking about but there's that part where where he says you know we just we made a mistake we tried to break into the film and TV industry for three whole years and we got nowhere so we're just selling and it's like three years is not very much to try to break into a whole other okay it's fine yeah that that interview it's out there uh Fortune Magazine so you can read it for yourselves out there and listener land uh but it's it's funny uh it's awkward it's everything that I love about life is is right there in that interview we have time actually to get to some viewer and listener questions Vier questions listen questions we're reaching into the bag of listen viewer questions that's a jingle I just made I'm just pitching that maybe that jingle I'm gonna start with a question just because they're asking Ben and Ben's not here uh so lulworth asks hi Ben is there an average player who are they is it you how often do they play and for how long do they own and have they read the player's handbook or the dungeon Masters Guide do they just play D and D or do they play other games how about online versus Homebrew I was actually going to ask this as a beginning question to you before I read that the question was here I was going to phrase it a little differently but I'm really curious to hear what you James and Dale have to say about this question from lorth I love this is such a good question because they know there's no answer that we can give it feels like a trap it's so good it really I mean but doesn't that just get to the heart of so many things that we talk about here it's like players don't want X players do want Y and ultimately it's like okay but who are players who is the average DND D player and I just don't know you might be able to find a modal average but if you're trying to find you know the mean average of D andd players to take every D andd player into a world blend them up ideologically and print out the the the mean average D no such player I would like a the average dndd player is a AI people keep trying to play D and D with AI with AI being the dungeon master what if we try to play D and D with AI but make AI be the player huh did we ever think about that I would like that more than most of my players no Sean no don't be seduced by the dark side sorry AI smells so much better than my players I'm just saying it's true it never tries to steal from random NPCs no I don't have to bail AI out at 3 in the morning on random Saturdays just saying you can trust that it's rolling randomly and not fudging its dice I trust no such things I I I don't believe you um no you're right it rolls 10.5 every single time or it's learned from degenerate player behavior and actually fudges every roll because it's learned that that's the optimal solution and we lie I got a 20 again well statistically unlikely I have in fact rolled four 20s in a row this game yeah all right Mr Data I don't believe you um what were we talking about modal averages we're talking about the the average D and D player all I can say I've never met him yeah I have uh he's quite boring to be honest no the there isn't an average player but there are I'm going to go way back into my marketing life here there are Arch types right there are personas that you can group together to make certain uh assumptions about at least a portion of the player base so is there an average player absolutely not uh but you can say there is this type of player the player who plays for hours a week in a home game that is home brewed by their DM what is the likelihood that they have bought the player's handbook that you can figure out what's the likelihood that they have read the dungeon Masters Guide that you can actually find the data and figure out and that's one way for evil you can business wise uh move things around and find things but also just for help purposes what do those players need what do the players need who only play once a month at the local game store uh because they can't find a home game you can say oh okay this is who they are this is what they need and then you can take resources and move them in that direction to help them get to the next step or help them achieve some goal of playing more regularly of running their own game and those sorts of things you actually can look at and I'm sure Wizards does with all those surveys they send out if they're doing those surveys correctly uh they are creating those those Arch types those personas and using that data to hopefully make the game better uh both rules-wise and uh accessibility wise for everyone well I think that's the only way you can do it with a game that's trying to do what D and is trying to do right because there's no wrong way to make a game only wrong your intentions only wrong for your your desires your outcomes uh because D and D is in the unfortunate position of trying to be all things to all people it needs to create these average players these archetypes uh to kind of they need to make up a guy and make that guy happy um and so if if they do their job in identifying what those sort of archetypes what traits those archetypes like to compile see this is I think a pretty good use for AI actually right can you make an AI that likes these qualities and then start generating perhaps what that wants and then you can start using that as a baseline to design from um I think that's actually a really good use for AI because it's trying to collate enormous amounts of data that's something that humans are naturally very bad at um so if you can do that that's great if you're if on the other hand if you're writing for blades in the dark or an even more Niche indie game than that you're much better off thinking of a particular type of player and designing for an audience of maybe you know a hundred individual sickos who like that thing um it's the best art advice I ever gave don't try and make art for everyone make art for 100 individual sickos and and you will make something very good not for everyone but the people who like it will really really like it um but that's not what D&D is trying to do so yeah yeah it's all about it's all about those archetypes I don't know about an average DND D player but what I do know is that 40% of the player base is women you do know you do in fact know that Gabriel's question Gabriel asks have any of you ever run a chase scene I know there were rules for it in the dungeon Masters Guide but I never saw or hear anyone ever using it how can you make a Chase feel right Dale you're flexing a bit well I just I'm just eager and ready to put one James hake in the hot seat real quick um since one could say that kind of the climactic scene of Water Deep Dragon Heist is a Chase sequence and it is a fairly unusual um sort of chapter of an adventure in a in a sort of you know official D and D module because it's um a series of different scenes that come together in a different order depending on which villain you chose chose to kind of pursue and I just am curious uh about your your kind of insights on how that came together and not to I mean look am I saying it's the greatest chase scene ever written we'll come back to that but I am curious about what you have to say well Dale I hate to disappoint you but you'll have to refer to the other James to mcdm own James incasso because he wrote that brilliant of design um but in that case that's the worst one I've ever seen get ino in here get him in here I know you're in chat you've been in chat before James um no but but I am actually I'm editing a 5y style Chase sequence right now actually uh my my friend Brooks wrote One For an upcoming thing uh and I I've been looking it over it's it's a Minecart Chase which comes with its own set of slightly different situations because everyone is kind of in the same train car together right they're all going at the same speed rather than potentially splitting off and doing individual complications like the t&g wants um and what I found looking at this is that if the party moves as a unit and they need to cover any sort of distance they're going they want to go about a thousand feet in this Chase sequence that's one of the conditions for winning um then even moving at this Minecart speed of 90 feet round that is like 20 rounds of Chase sequence with one complication at the end of every single player's turn which is like 80 rolls on a D20 table half of which or nothing happens I I have my issues with 5's Chase rules I think I think 5's Chase sequences would work a lot better if they went even more abstract they try to go abstract but they're still hung up on this tactical movement nonsense that despite trying to rid themselves of they can't seem to decouple you you need to have something that's even more just like scene and complication based make the complications the beats and have the chase scene just be make it make it a 3X structure or like a 5x structure right five beats in your Chase that come with something new and that could be an enemy action it could be a complication it could be whatever maybe even make a D6 table to roll on it right the complication is enemy cast a spell or enemy throws a rock or something if if you can if you can just abstract it away even more from 5e combat because obviously they're trying to do that anyway you'll have a better Chase sequence system than what we got in the DMG I've I've tried my hand at uh multiple different methods of of Chase scenes and I think ultimately what I have leared is that if you really want to keep up the energy because because there is this this you know sort of kinetic energy in a chase scene in a film or whatever if you want to keep up that energy it's got to be in your hands as the DM I think a lot of this is keeping up the description like knowing what's going to happen honestly forget forget the the freedom of choice I know it's a TTR RPG but if you want it to feel like a chase scene you kind of have to you know we talk about pools and rivers no pools no pools you're in the you're into the white waterer Rapids right now and you're just describing things that are happening and then every now and then throw an AB choice at one of your players right this is what's happening they duck down this Alleyway Rogue do you stay on the ground or do you go up onto the roofs right that that's the deal like do do you try to take the shortcut do you go up on the roofs they make their choice you describe what happens right don't stop for rolls I understand why we would want to I understand why the players might want to but if you keep up that pace hopefully your players aren't stopping to think why aren't I allowed to try and do XYZ they're just kind of listening to what's happening and then making the choice in that frantic moment that you give to them um give a choice to each player maybe check in a couple of group choices uh so that it you know feels like it's not literally one per player um but you know keep it exciting keep it keep the ball in your own court so that you can control that EX exting flavor because if you hand it over to your players too much they will say things like I'm going to shoot him and then they will have lots of bonuses to it and they will shoot him and the only logical thing that happen is that he falls down or it turns into a combat scene um yeah when when I was in uh Australia last for paaw um I stayed with Ben bur and it's a shame he's not here right now because he could back me up on this we watched uh The Adventures of Tintin the animated movie and uh I was a little disappointed by that movie I thought it was a lot better than my my memory was better than the movie actually was but the best part of that movie is this madcap chase scene through a vaguely middle eastern city where they you know they start on a moped or a truck or something and between all of like dams bursting and people shooting rocket launchers they wind up with just the handlebars of a moped you know ziplining down a power line it's like every couple of seconds and something completely changes the landscape and uh you you just can't really do that in a scene where everybody is thinking about Choice all the time yeah things just have to happen in a kinetic Chase sequence the the question is why do you want a chase scene right do you want to chase scene to figure out if someone gets away don't do that uh because it doesn't work with 5 uh as James and Dale have both already said um if you want those big explosive pivotal engaging moments just have those big moments and do it in the form of a Chas scene but don't uh there's no chase involved it's just these things are happening to you Sean did you wind up using the chase rules that were in agents of the Empire that ghostfire published ever I did not I did not when I was running that Adventure it always made more sense to focus on spoilers uh the blimp and so that was where the fun was and so we we focused the camera on that and we stayed there see that's so interesting because Michael did just bring up in chat how did James Bond movies do it they have at least one in every movie and agents of the Empire is the the Spy Adventure basically right it is such a a a Trope of that genre and I think you can learn a lot by going and watching a bunch of sort of spy movies fugitive movies your Jason bournes just watch in kind of what are the what are the Beats that are important to feeling that sort of high octane pace of these sequences and seeing how you can kind of translate that to um a spoken word game um someone else in chat described it as being like a QuickTime event in a video game and I think that's I think that's a a pretty good fit but the the benefit that you have in a ttrpg is that you're not you don't then have to literally map out uh every single outcome because you have the flexibility to kind of uh morph it so it's I think it's very similar to that energy but kind of with better control the thing that I've tried to do in the few that I've done recently is make the chase to to get into a position where you can do the thing that you actually want to do so it's not you start 90 feet away and let's measure it it's they're in the distance you need to successfully do these four things then you can get to a point where we can get into the mechanics and you can use your magic Missile from hundreds of feet away or your Longbow from 600 feet away and do those cool things that you could only do from range but you have to get to that point yeah in order to do it first which is why chases are so good in urban environments and so difficult in nonurban environments because you really want to keep a lot of innocent um bystanders between you and the target at all times well so until the very end a a chasing core attention of course is will the heroes get them but in uh an action a heroic action medium the real question is not will they because we know they will the the the interest is in how will they and by that metric we can say that making interesting choices is the heart of a good Chase also sometimes the only interesting choice is also the only obvious solution right like let's say you know take it out of the urban environment right just like Dale told us not to do let's say we're running down a mountain side or you know we're riding can't believe you've done this we're going a SL down a mountain side yeah we're doing a James Bond like ski Chase it's like Willow you're going down this mountain side and you know the the bad guy is you know outside of Longbow range 600 feet away from you and you're moving at roughly the same Pace you can't you know you can't just out skill them you need to outthink them well you could follow directly in their path but if you're equally skilled there's no way that will catch them which means that there's no choice you have to make a shortcut somehow okay so how do you make the shortcut uh the DM will present you with the shortcut so your only choice is I'll take the shortcut and you got to make it do and make it happen which means to me the heart of an RPG chase scene is the DM saying this is what the shortcut is like make one role describe how you do it to me it is a cutscene that two one of two people gets to describe it's either the GM describes it in which case it's the GM describing eight things in a row or the players get the opportunity to take the fiction away from the GM and describe how they do a cool thing that how that's how you get that kinetic fast-pace action I just had a thought it's not fully there yet it's not fully there yet bring theable bear with but I was just thinking about there's there's always this you know the the D20 roll plus modifiers really drags down the chasing for me what if it's somehow a coin flip instead oh like like we just bring it down to does it work does it not work really really reinforce that binary and I feel like there's there's something that still needs to be massaged in there because there are things where it's like okay but you should get some kind of a benefit or a bonus because you are good at XY Z thing but I think there's something in that that idea of it's it's down to chance more than it is down to skill because everything is just happening on top of each other each each character who does the things that need to be done you made all three or all four of the checks along the way you get to flip a coin so if if every character gets to make the flip it's still if there's five characters you need one heads out of five that's what 50 25 12 seven right percent chance if only one of you makes it then you could gauge it that way like like a like a fully simplified uh skill challenge right exactly exactly oh just one little question on Chase leads to so much uh I love I love this panel and I love our listen listeners thank you Gabrielle for the question I think we are at that time where we have to say goodbye but these questions were great and I want James and Dale together either alternating or at the same time to tell everyone out there how they can get their question read wait okay we're got to do this like the twins from The Shining you ready all right do do we start with come play with us do we yes come come email us at okay that's what we'll do okay okay okay okay ready three two one come email usem us podcast.com d i Wonder Twin Powers didn't activate ohale froze she's back I just died uh I believe what they were trying to say is come email us at podcast ghostfire gaming.com there's another one where that went perfectly yes but we are not living in that world but we are living in a wonderful world thank you everybody in the chat thank you all our listeners uh thank you James hake thank you Dale Kingsmill I've been Sean mwin we are out and we'll catch you next week same time same channel B up here we can say as many [Music] B oh dear when Ben's away the lore cats will play

Channel: Ghostfire Podcasts

Views: 6,656

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, gamplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DnD, DM, Eldritch, Lorecast, Ben, Byrne, Ghostfire, podcast, podcasting, 5th Edition, ttrpg, 5.5e, dice, design, dnd, adventure, news, WotC, Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast, Beyond, dragon, grim hollow, Chris Cocks, Player's Hand Book, PHB, One DnD, chase scenes, average player, weapon mastery, martial, geeks

Id: rw8o464BaNM

Length: 55min 51sec (3351 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024