Getting D&D's Modularity Back – Lazy RPG Talk Show

"Nobody ever reads it, but if you read your 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide" This line alone I think summarizes so much of the weird annoyance I have with the 5e Community online. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a newbie DM ask how to do something and then be answered with 'oh you should look at homebrew X or 3rd party Y to add it' when the answer is literally in the DMG. For some reason it seems like everyone just views the DMG as the 'magic item table book that also has the Oathbreaker Paladin and Death Cleric in it' and nothing more.

As a patron myself, I don’t have a question so much as a Huge Thank You for all of the organization you put into your site and your YouTube videos! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been able to easily go back and find the article or video I need! I don’t think any other YouTuber makes accessing their content as easy as yours is! I appreciate it so much! Thanks for all the work!

Thats why I like Owlbear rodeo..as recommended by Mike. Easy peasy to set-up. Load the map , throw the tokens on, fog of war the whole map. Manually cut out the fog as the players can see areas.

I’ve been dm-ing for my wife and some family members for the last couple of years. I got my shadowdark kickstarter in the mail and was so excited I played it 1on1 with my wife. She said not only did she really enjoy it, but that if we would have started with shadowdark instead of 5E, she would have found it far less overwhelming. So I think there’s something here to this ‘shadowdark as a 5E starter kit’.

Running games using the free Basic 5E rules - no feats, no skills - has been some of the most fun my players have had. Everything moved so fast, and opened up so much room for creative solutions. And now we’re about to start using Shadowdark.

No matter how dominant DnDBeyond gets, players will go where the DMs are. No player has ever left a game they really wanted to be in because it wasn't on their favorite VTT.

Buying just what you need to play my class in a TTRPG and buying a non-game effecting skin or having to buy additional stuff to ease play or win in a video game are not the same thing. The first can act as a low cost hook into the game the other is exploitation. Back in the day, I'd photocopy what the player needed out of the PHB if they didn't have the book or couldn't afford it or get access because we were poor high school kids in the middle of nowhere. I do agree that Hasbro is for profit publicly traded company and will do what they can to maximize profits and are well within their rights to do so. You hit the nail on the head with their primary customers are stockholders. Doing what's good for the community is, at best, a side effect. To everyone out there: DON'T LET FOMO DRIVE YOU! Play your game your way.

My impression so far is they've been super worried about what they call "mother may I" mechanics and have tried to eliminate those. At the same time, they seem oblivious or indifferent to all the elements they're introducing where if a DM wants to exclude something and say no, the DM is basically the bad guy denying players candy. It's a weird shift of the default because it's so much easier and feels better for everyone involved for the DM to be generous and give you something extra to the rules (e.g. a free starting feat), whereas it sucks for everyone if a DM has to subtract stuff and toys simply because they might want the "we're not superheroes quite yet"-phase of the game to last longer than 2-3 levels (which is another weird trend; you'd think having 20 levels to work with would allow D&D to cover a huge range of player fantasies and from low-magic, gritty to ultra-super-heroic. Yet they seem hell-bent to cram ever more stuff into tier one and ignore that people could just start their campaigns at a higher level if they're looking for the high-powered experience).

The part about not treating D&D as a monolith needs to be shouted from the rooftops. I don’t remember where I discovered this man, but I hold him and his books mostly responsible for making me believe in the TTRPG hobby again after years of post-burnout skepticism. I am now running a Shadowdark game in the Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands setting, strictly because Mike’s recommendations turned me onto those publications, and it’s the most fun my players and I have probably ever had in this hobby. If you’re running games and not at least considering what this guy has to say, you are selling yourself short. Can’t wait to back City of Arches!

In the middle of playing a shadowdark game. My group is a fan of the simplicity but not interested in the lethality. So we just homebrewed 1. Max HP at 1st level. 2. 5E standard rolling for stats (so it skews higher) making it feel slightly more heroic. 3. used most or modified optional Pulp Rules found in Shadowdark. Seems to be working so far as a player. It’s less lethal but still pretty dangerous, especially compared to 5E.

Want to give a shout out to Heroes of Hesiod which is designed for young children. It is a super easy system and my children really enjoyed it. I used it as a gateway drug for DnD. When they got a bit older I converted their characters to DnD 3.5 as I had the books from way back. During the lock down years we swapped again to 5e and went online to play with friends in another city. We have been working through my heavily modded LMoP campaign ever since. We all still remember fondly our Heroes of Hesiod days though.

22:47 RE: Modularity. For real! It was the part of the NEXT playtest that I was most excited about. I would have loved to see the system stripped to basics/essentials, then optional variant rules/subsystems to add or tweak based on your group. A stable foundation to build off of. I think it would have supported homebrew better. *(just my thoughts and opinions. Great video, Mike 😊)

I play Shadowdark with max HP at first level (roll normally thereafter) and I find it doesn't really affect the lethality in any significant way. Even fighters with 8 - 10 HP can drop from a single attack, or two attacks, pretty easily.

I’ll check out the kickstarter 👍🏿 I would like to offer a critique to your critique to the community - micro transactions in a video game are very different from buying pages of a book a la cart - Treantmonk was similarly wrong about this - it’s a false equivalence - furthermore, if you don’t want people to liken D&D to a video game, I think it’s dishonest to then liken its activities to video games when arguing against those people, but perhaps I misunderstood your point - also, I’m not sure we can generalize those two groups without good data - as well, the story is not that the community is in shock regarding a capitalist institution being evil, it is that the community is enraged that they have moved further down that road - I don’t think it’s helpful to counter protests with, “what did you expect?” - you are however correct in so far as the connection to the monopoly they want to build with D&D Beyond, but the community has no control over that - we did not make the bed that we must sleep in - we must work together if we wish to hold an institution’s feet to the fire as you say, and as a powerful voice in the community, speaking against the people who ultimately want the same thing you want is counterproductive if not damaging to the hobby - I don’t use D&D Beyond, but I do support those in the community who must use a virtual table top to play - whether or not a false accusation strengthens the position of the accused is dubious, BUT I don’t think these are false accusations - they are using the same underhanded business techniques that we’ve seen in other fields, especially video games - I don’t think the “everything WotC is evil” mentality is necessarily useful, but I question how pervasive it truly is - they’ve worked hard to lose the respect of the community (we don’t need to rehash the scandals), but if they do make good on their promises to, say release an updated SRD, they ought to reaccrue some level of respect - that said and counter point: we don’t “owe” a business (really any business) any level of faith unless we are a majority stock holder and therefore able to exert some level of influence over them directly as opposed to the methods of protest - this is a passionate issue, as I’m sure you know, but i think your voiced perspective on it, however nuanced, has been errantly skewed by your frustration with the nay sayers - I think you even have a level of recognition for this given your brief self critique following your statements on the topic around 19:50 - I would ask you to examine that dissonance and consider if there may be room to develop a more cogent position and statement on the issue - I’ll be honest, I’d be surprised if you read all this, but if you do, please know that I deeply respect you, your opinions, the material you’ve produced and the position you have in the community - I hope I have not alienated you, but if I have, I do apologize - just as for you, this is a topic of passion for me, and it can be difficult to restrain yourself from speaking your mind in such circumstanc

Zoned combat for the theatre of the mind vs battle maps VTT issue. You can find templates for “Ultimate Dungeon Terrain” like overlays that you can put into your VTT. Oddly enough, I put out a PWYW set of templates on DTRPG on Saturday just for this problem.

Yes on modularity! A big missing opportunity in my opinion though, was not helping the user to put the various options together in a meaningful way to to change the feel of the game. For example, a tale that suggests which rules to use for various playstyles....Old-School Mode, Standard Mode, Superhero Mode, etc. D&D is big and broad enough (and with the historical perspective and experience) that it really can be a game for almost everyone IF it's built in a flexible and modular way. The OSR should belong to Wizards... mostly it's built from WoTC's past!... but they gave it away because they haven't made it easy for players to see how to make the game work for different play styles. And as time has gone on, I would say they are narrowing the game to a certain rules set and also a certain play style and flavor.

Re. Matthew D.'s VTT maps question: don't look for a perfect map for your encounter; design your encounter around a cool map you have. Coming from TotM, where I started every encounter design in my imagination, it took me a long time to learn that there will never be a map to fit that perfectly. If you're using a map, start with the map. I also hate dynamic lighting as a player precisely because it means I can't take part vicariously in the long periods when it's others' turns.

Good luck on the Kickstarter! It's been interesting to follow the development of the City of Arches over the last two(!) years.

I agree 1000% on your thesis of the preorder stuff being symptomatic of the DnDB root cause.

Great observations regarding modularity and optional rules. Personally I think most people will just pick and choose which rules/options they like best from each respective edition and just use those rather than completely switching to the new edition. I really like a lot of the optional rules in the 2014 DMG and I wish more people read it so they'd be aware of them. I think feats work incredibly well as quest or adventure rewards too, better than just arbitrarily picking one when you reach certain levels. It's also funny that another optional rule in 2014, epic boons, has become a fixed rule in 2024 and WotC is treating epic boons as if it's a completely new thing. I don't know anyone who used epic boons in 2014, and I've only started DMing relatively recently so I haven't had a chance to give them to players yet but it's something I plan to use if we continue with 2014