Dawn of a New Age?

Well, I might have had ambitions about posting on this blog, but it's been almost 9 months, and not a word. That is how it goes, but it is time to get in here. D&D is coming out with a new edition! or - revision to the current edition! or - what is this thing?

They have new books coming out: Player's Handbook due in a couple weeks, DMG later, Monster Manuel sometime next year. Is this a new edition? They say not; the 2024 - something - to D&D 5th edition. I guess. I don't really mean with make a lot of this - this has become something of a trend in the industry. Mongoose did it with Traveller - their 2nd edition rules came out I'm 2016, and they put out a revision in 2022 - a revision that was in fact pretty much the same book. Better art, better layout, some clean up here and there, a few changes to tables here and there, but nothing that changed the game. Transparently easy to play a game with both books at the table - the revision really is a revision top the look of the book, more than anything. And Paizo did something similar with Pathfinder 2nd Edition - their 2E came out in 2018, and a "remastered" edition came out in 2023. This had more changes than Traveller - including removing anything that could tie the books to WOTC's old OGL - but it's a similar idea. New books, same game.

That's what WOTC claims we will have. They tout its backward compatibility - they tout its improved look. Things like that. Will it be true? Have to have the things in hand, I suppose, to say. Now - there are a lot of the things out in the wild; people have been reviewing them. I have not seen one - I have watched some of the reviews, but not obsessively. This post is very definitely about the anticipation, and expectations. When the thing itself arrives (and I've put in a word at my FLGS for one) I will come back and see what I have to say about it. (I promise that post, is nothing else; hopefully before 7th edition comes out.) For now? What do I think is going to happen?

First: I will buy one. I would no matter what - I am a completist, I have the rest of the D&D versions (not true: I don't have ODD, Holmes Basic, Cook basic, or most of the 2E core books; I have access to most of them though), and would get this no matter what. I am curious, as well - what is in there? is it worth the hype? is there anything better in it? I want to know. I will probably get the DMG on those grounds alone - with curiosity maybe overcoming the completeness: can they make something of the DMG? the current one is a bit of a flop, I think. I want to see these books. There is that. And I have put in a word for one - the alt cover, specifically, since the alt PHB cover is just fantastic. I want to have one of these things.

Will I use it? I will certainly play around with it - make up characters, play some fights - try to play a couple adventures maybe - a starter set or something like the old adventures in the Infinite Staircase or Yawning Portal books. I expect the D&D games I am in will start using it - at least next year, or whenever we get out of the adventures we're in now - maybe sooner depending on what people think of it. So I will use them. 

On the other hand, I doubt I will run anything with them. That doesn't have a lot to do with the editions - that has to do with D&D. I have kind of gotten tired of D&D. Again - not really because of anything wrong with D&D - because I am tired of level/class based games. I like skill based systems. I would much rather devote my time to something like Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, maybe Cyberpunk or try out Pendragon or Vaesen or something instead. But this is taste, and doesn't have much to do with the editions, and isn't enough to make me stop playing D&D if someone else is willing to run - so - just keep it in mind.

So - still anticipating this new version - what do I think, based on what I have seen so far? I think - it looks like it will be more or less easy to switch. I don't think it is exactly compatible with the 2014 version, the way Mongoose 22 is compatible with Mongoose 16. There are twists in character creation, in classes and subclasses, in abilities, attributes and so on that I think will make blending the systems a bit off. But it looks easy to switch, without wrecking what you have. (Unless you are playing a swashbuckler.) 

From what I have seen - I like character creation - I think the redistribution of decision points among races, backgrounds and the like makes sense - makes the whole process easier, more rational, more modular. I like most of the specifics and I like the general al shape of it. Classes? seem fine - close enough to what they are to not require relearning anything; maybe simpler to explain to newbies - I think they have something in there warning new players about what classes are more work than others. Sounds good. The subclasses also seem fine - though a lot of the changes seem kind of fiddly. Just shifting things around in a maybe pointless effort to make everything sort of work the same. Most of the specifics seem fine - though there are a couple completely unexplainable decisions. Going from 567.5 cleric domains to 4 is going to be painful, especially since at least 6 of the 2014 cleric domains were absolute bangers, and only 2 of those bangers made the cut. (Light and Life; but Tempest might have been the best subclass in the game, and Grave, Forge, and Twilights are all monsters and - so are a bunch of others. Clerics were the boss class in 5e 2014.) 

Worse: in 10 years of playing, I have seen people play 2 subclasses of rogue (other than a couple random thieves and multi class scouts and the like). Arcane Triocksters made the cut, as they should. But there is no excuse for not making the Swashbuckler a core rogue subclass. They gave us a psionic thief over the swashbuckler? they tried to fix the assassin, rather than just give us the swashbuckler? This is a failure off the worst kind. Swashbucklers are as fundamental to the class as it comes. It is certainly what people want to play. Just unbelievable.

The rest? Rangers still seem to suck. They've done a bunch of stuff with weapons and fighters to make them more complicated. They've allegedly improved monks and maybe warlocks, tried to gimp paladins, etc. The overall impression I get though is that things are roughly the same - but a lot more fiddly. In fac fiddly is the word I would use to describe almost all the changes I have seen. Fiddly in two senses. First - they've just fiddled around with all these things. Nothing is really different - but it is full of little differences that are mostly just going to confuse people who can't keep their editions straight. And second - they've added a lot of things - like weapon properties and masteries - that are fiddly in the sense of adding a bunch of little stuff to think about. Things to remember in a fight; things to keep track of; new ways of keeping track of things. Will it matter? I don't know, until we get it - maybe not in practice - but who knows? It does sound, from a lot of the online comments I've seen, that they have added a lot of fodder for the min-maxers among us. Is that good? if you're a min-maxer, I suppose. I don't know.

So - that is all I have for now. We're getting close: I do look forward to seeing this and playing with it. I hope it works, I hope it doesn't annoy me (and worse than not putting swashbucklers in the core book.) I do look forward to seeing the thing itself - the art looks - gorgeous, if maybe a bit off. Their recent pastel color palette is not encouraging - though all the art I have seen is really great looking. Who knows. I am looking forward to it, even if I am kind of sour on D&D.

World Anvil

I have been playing with World Anvil this weekend. I like it very much. World Anvil is a world building site - a database for world building for games or fiction, that allows you to create and track information about your world, and then present it in various ways to others. you can get a lot of use out of it without paying a penny - though the paid versions offer some very appealing features, and aren't all that expensive. I am likely to ante up for at least the first level of it.

There are plenty of places to find reviews (that one is on Nerdarchy): I want to write more about how I use it and what I wish it could do. Which might be best read as, what I haven't figured out how to do yet - it is fairly extensive, with lots of interrelated pieces and templates, that are sometimes hard to fit together (at least in the 4 days I've been using it.) I think it is a very useful resource, though, and am probably going to start digging into it hard.

It works very well at what it does, I think. It is a fine way to organize material and present it. The templates for different pieces of the world, types of information - people, places, organizations, etc - are full of options, collecting what you need to describe those pieces. Some of it is obvious - some of it works as a spark, to think about the elements you need. Ticks and quirks and tone of voice and date and conditions of birth for people; coinage of the realm, founding date, judicial systems and so on for countries or organizations. A lot of these are sparks to think through story elements - they are very useful. There are lots of options, but they are easy enough to figure out. It is possible to put down a pretty basic record, too, and come back to add what you need.

Where things get complicated is in how the different types of records relate to one another, and how they display. The software publishes its information in a Wiki-like format - but doesn't always quite seem to follow the flow I would like. The best example I can see is with a country or city. You can enter a place as a physical place, a "location" - Lenay, say; and you can enter it as a country, which is called and "organization" - The Kingdom of Lenay, for instance. Both types of record collect a lot of good and useful information - but as nearly as I can tell, they are both published as separate pages. What I would want would be one page that could present at least an outline of all of it - the land and people, weather and conditions, the history and politics and cultural factors, the people associated with it, all one one page. (At least outlined on one page, like Wikipedia itself.) To be fair - this strikes me as something that is probably possible with some advanced settings. I might have not figured it out yet. But it's odd, and so far creates some complication, I think.

There is also the question of what I want to do with it. The problem there is that I have way too much information to do anything simple with it. Getting what I want in there (assuming I can decide what I want and don't want) is a daunting task. There's also the problem of how to split information up. I have been doing this for 35 years, both for D&D and for writing. There's a lot of material, and it falls into both categories - fiction and game material. There is a lot that is only really applicable to writing; other that is applicable to games but not fiction; some that is different. Pieces can get moved around, characters and situations reused or changed. I want to be able to put the game material out where others can use it - but I also want to organize the fictional material. This is a good way to keep it all straight - but using it for both games and stories might just make it more complicated.

That's my problem, I suppose. And it's a problem created by the fact that this is a very useful piece of software, something I am eager to use to organize both D&D campaigns and fiction writing. So - I am very happy to have finally gone on the site and started playing with it.

Shipment Arrived!

Good thing UPS delivers late on Saturdays - found this outside my door today....



Others, it must be said, are equally excited.



A quick glance through it shows a couple useful bits of information - monsters are pretty consistently more impressive than they were in the play test sets. A Young Green Dragon has an 18 AC, 136 HP - things like that - which sounds about right. That is the apex monster in this box - which seems to allow characters to advance to about 5th level - but that sounds about right. The set has its merits - a decent looking pre-made adventure, some okay pre made characters... It's clearly designed for newcomers, though also made to allow veterans to get a taste of the game - lots of explanation of basic concepts, though not really in an annoying way. A good start, I suppose. I await the player's handbook...

Though some of us seem to be ready to play now: