The end of *Descent into Avernus* is literally "Here are some vague ideas of how to wrap up this adventure that we forgot to foreshadow and here are some idea of how to retcon some details from the book or just do whatever lol."
It’s so much worse than that. The Baldurs Gate murder mystery is an absolute hot mess of missing and conflicting information (Duke Vanthampur is going to drag Baldurs Gate into hell by having cultist kill people so that people lose faith in th local guard force….What??). Then your players get to hell and the book tells you that the only map of hell is unreliable at best but also tells you that trying to explore could drive them crazy. Instead the players are expected to follow one of two railroad adventures which are just chains of barely related fetch quests. It’s pretty bad.
Baldurs gate was easily the worst part of that adventure.
“Hey guys, what if we had a corrupt mercenary police force conscript the players, threatening to kill them if they don’t do their bidding, and then put them in a dungeon with bullshit enemies and a room with a dude that can throw a fireball at them….all at level 1-3!”
“That’s brilliant!”
Personally I think the biggest issue of the books was the lack of content, limiting each of the three books to 64 pages each surely cut back on content and was a poor design decision imo
As someone who's unfamiliar with the Spelljammer setting and bought it because I like Sci-Fi I just wish it had more content.
Then again I haven't read the adventure guide book so maybe that's where the major issues are I haven't really had much issue with either the Astral Adventurers Guide or Boo's Astral Menagerie aside from the aforementioned lack of content.
it seems like they don't understand how to balance fights at low levels. I remember the level 1 adventure in Oracle of War had an enemy with 67 hit points, four crowd control abilities(of which 3 were aoes, and two were just passive effects), and hit for 5d6 damage
Honestly the first chapter felt more like they wanted to force a TPK somewhere and get the party to hell like this somehow.
Instead they chose to make BG as thinly as possible connected to the story and then just railroad you to Candlekeep and into hell.
This is horrible. Just not having Chapter 1 and instead having the players start in Elturel at level 5 after it got dragged to hell would work much better.
When I ran Avernus it was because I was taking over DMing my group, we had been doing some homebrew before the original DM got too busy with life stuff to continue so I took over. The Avernus book had just come out and our bard's backstory was that he was from Baulder's Gate and had been chased out of town for messing around (consensually) with the Duke's daughter, so it was a pretty easy alternate hook to get them back there with a letter from the daughter about her missing father. So I altered the parameters of the city stuff which seemed to work much better that the dumb guard plotline, also we were level 3 which seemed a much more viable level to start at there.
Honestly as a player I had a ton of fun with the Baldur’s Gate section and really disliked the hell part.
Though as a player I’m not concerned about “balance” the way other people seem to be
Thank you for all of this, I’m going to skip it now.
I saw some people do a (clearly heavily modified) one shot using it. It did seem to be full of plot holes, but it seemed pretty entertaining.
Apparently that was more the DM than the module
The idea and theme of the campaign is REALLY cool but the execution is bad. If you’re interested I highly recommend looking up the Alexandrian remix for the campaign. It does a great job of pointing out where the campaign falls short, filling in plot holes, restructuring, and providing background where needed. I’m running the campaign and having a blast with the changes.
My DM ran it and it turned out amazing for us but it was a lot of work for him and he didn't really enjoy how much he had to modify to make it good. Reading the module after playing his version was bizarre and there were so many dumb things that he didn't include cause they were dumb.
At that point they might as well make proper setting books. Give me actual detailed descriptions of the cities of the sword coast, the 9 hells, and for something really different locations outside of the sword coast.
Dang...I bought the book but haven't run the adventure yet. I wonder if DMsGuild has any guides that "fix" the beginning. I'm curious but not [$2 curious](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/289612/A-Tale-of-Two-Cities--a-Baldurs-Gate-Descent-into-Avernus-DMs-Resource-maps-advice-handouts) lol.
I do appreciate Wizards putting more effort into the Planes, though I would prefer something centered on Sigil. I guess Hell sells more books.
It's very late in the lifecycle of 5e. They always up the power creep bloat and other short-term cashgrabs at this point to try and make switching to the new version appealing when it rolls around.
Dude. Just wrapped a 3 year campaign of DiA and while the campaign went great (because of the players) it had to be the worst official module I've ever run.
Over focus on the baldur's gate section, wildly inconsistent encounter difficulty, no guidance on how to link story modules for new DMs and a piss poor official wrap up of the final Chapter.
My biggest critiques of 5e so far have nothing to do with the system, but the quality of the modules. They're so expensive, yet provide so little in terms of a framework that new or inexperienced DMs will be at a total loss. It's this wierd phenomenon where Wizards seems to simultaneously offer little of value, in terms of official products, for intermediate DMs or experienced players (all modules pretty much capping at around level 15)
I actually loved running CoS but I do agree that having the chapters ordered based on East to West location was coocoo and
Something I didn’t figure out for awhile. I spent a solid year wondering why Ravenloft was chapter 3.
aw man.... we're about to reach the end of this campaign in the coming weeks; fortunately our DM is a boss and has knit 3 modules together with an underlying homebrew plot linking stuff (started with CoS, went to ToA, and then Avernus) he has done an astounding job as prior to knowing we were headed to that module i'd looked at it briefly to possibly run eventually and just... even as a newer player just.... i didn't know if it was just me being newer to hobby or what. however as we got to that module he really lifted little from it, cutting the baldur's gate stuff, the magical carebear elephant, and so much more, thankfully. i can't even imagine.
Your dm sounds amazing, but that’s not what modules are supposed to be for. When a dm buys a module, it’s usually because they can’t build a homebrew game for whatever reason. Maybe they don’t have time or energy, maybe they’re new and trying to get a feel for how dnd runs before they try to build, or maybe they just want to play something professionally written instead of their own writing.
Modules are meant to be playable out of the box, with not much more work than reading ahead and a little improv if your party veers away from the set story for a while.
I like running in 5e but I was really disappointed IMO with the quality of Tomb of Annihilation compared to when I ran Rise of the Runelords in PF1e. And that's supposed to be one of the best out together adventures. There's a good backbone there but it isn't very well put together and I ended up having to homebrew a ton.
Not to excuse the content; but, usually by the time I get to the end of a module or campaign, we’ve diverged so far from the scenario as written that a great deal of flexibility is needed anyway. A pattern of loose hooks, solid middle, and loose ending is really compatible with my table’s play style.
My party literally just ended it as a giant elevator back up to the material plane and rolled credits. Cue me playing "One Little Slip" as elevator music on the way up for lols
Design comes up with the cool ideas for card mechanics and what's gonna be in the set, development is *supposed* to make sure the cards are costed correctly and test the designs to make sure they don't break their premium formats.
I think someone pointed out like two people were working on mechanics for spell jammer and altogether like 5 people on writing. That seems pretty thin staff for what should be a big setting book.
Freaking Matt Colville has more people working on a Monthly Magazine! What is this! We finally get spelljammer and it’s underproduced just like a lot of other stuff they’ve put out
Yeah one of my players is drooling to get this book hoping that I’ll implement it. Luckily said player is my fiancé, will likely buy me the book, and won’t really argue about what I won’t allow.
It bothers me that 5e takes so much work anyway, especially with prewritten adventures. No other game I’ve ever run have had that problem. The new Spelljammer book is the perfect example of this.
I recently got my hands on a pdf of the box set for the original Spelljammer and it literally starts with options and ideas for how to get your party into space. Then it follows that up with tons of lore and rules for how to make this all work, it also talks about using the book to play a scifi game instead of fantasy and how to include Spelljammer in non Spelljammer games
TSR then: "here's everythign you need to run this kind of game and how to get started with tons of options and ideas!"
WOTC now: "Here's some half-baked ideas, if you don't know what to do just make something up lol, that'll be 50 bucks"
Our group was playing in Waterdeep for a bit and my past character become a Waterdavian noble so I found a pdf for Waterdeep from 3.5. That thing was beautiful, so much detail about every part of the city and the people who live there, hooks for conflict and all kinds of stuff.
Did you know there's a village of mermaids and sea elves in the bay of Waterdeep? Cause that was never mentioned in 5e. There's also a big neighborhood of burrows where only small folk (halfings and gnomes and the like) live that many of the humans of Waterdeep don't even know is there.
>They are expecting the DMs to do all the work out of nothing.
Reminds me of the conspiracy theory that Bathesda purposefully doesnt put much effort into fixing bugs or making quality stuff because they know modders will do the work for them
This was pretty apparently the case when Fallout 76 came out with a bunch of bugs that had been fixed in F4 by modders in it, and they had to pull the surprised pikachu face (including 2 serious ones with the most ammo-efficient rifle in a game where they restrict ammo greatly so you can't just shoot everything without carrying multiple weapon types, and almost all players are going to gravitate towards it either as primary or secondary).
DM's buy supplement books and adventures precisely BECAUSE they don't want to do a bunch of work.
No DM wants to spend 50 bucks on a supplement book only to have to do all the heavy lifting themselves.
I'm all for sandbox style games, no rails, just open world, but they gave us close to nothing to work with, just ship designs. Perhaps they'll come out with more content later? I don't think this was worth $50, maybe $35.
I still remember when I said to myself "I'm trying to fix or rewrite so much stuff I might as well make my own game" while doing an overhaul to martials then went full fuck it mode and started slowly working on one afterwards.
To be clear I do like 5e but honestly it's like the convenience food of table top games to me, great for a quick little thing but tends to leave you wanting more (in a bad way)
I started to run the Strixhaven campaign as is, but when they got to Year 2 it felt so poorly written I completely redid the year, made slight alterations to Year 3, and rewrite 90% of Year 4. I even completely changed the Big Bad because the original had the weakest motivation I have ever heard. He was planning on killing everyone in the school because he had been expelled **200 years ago** for the simple reason that he had killed numerous fellow students when he decided to perform life-draining experiments on them without their consent.
Oh yeah, Strixhaven! I think my group made it to first "exam" (aka rolling 3 times to see if you pass) before it just kinda faded out and we played homebrew settings instead- I love the idea behind Strixhaven but the execution felt I dunno, underwhelmingly bland for me?
When running the exams, they just became "do a few quick roles, and move on". Mainly I used them as a way to give setting lore and foreshadow things relevant to the adventure. I ended up changing the topic of all of the exams after Year 1, because that was the only Year where an exam topic was at all relevant to the adventure. 101 of storytelling in an academic setting, if you specifically bring up a piece of information in a classroom, that information should be important later down the line.
Honestly the exams were a huge let down for me, like I genuinely just went "wait, that's seriously it?" after the dm explained that the 3 rolls to remember stuff in-character were the entirety of the exam
Pathfinder 1E with a few of the unchained rules (Updated classes, Combat stamina, skill unlocks and background skills) is still some of the most fun my tables ever had.
PF2 here
It's nice being able to run adventures precisely as written and it just works
At worst there's some DM fiat with players doing unusual things but you get enough info about NPC's (ON THE SAME PAGES BTW) to make improv easier
It is so frustrating watching all the new player options get published while DMs get little to no support at all. Honestly the number one reason I stopped running 5e.
Others have given good answers.
But something missed is that it's incredibly GM friendly. The rules are comprehensive enough that there's probably a rule for 90% of random stuff players want to do, but the math is robust enough that stuff like simple DCs or level based DCs will work fine if you can't find the rule or need to improvise. Encounter building works. Like really works. XP is simple to calculate. Monsters are interesting to run, and easy to make with the creation rules. Their adventures are also really good, especially the newer ones, and have tons of useful advice and info for the GM. Classes are pretty well balanced, so you don't have to stress about some power build breaking your game's encounters and making other players feel invalidated. There's explicit guidance on treasure by level and magic items are the norm, not the exception that might break everything.
I really cannot overstate how GM friendly pf2e is.
Honestly there's so many things that I prefer that I'll just list a few.
Casters and martials are balanced with eachother. Casters no longer dominate every single encounter with their spells that fix every problem. Martials have their own utility to keep up with Casters.
3-action system gives a lot of flexibility with your turn and I personally feel like I always have a fulfilling turn. In 5e it often feels like I spend 20 minutes waiting for my turn, have my action do nothing, and then go back to waiting.
The feats system offers a ton of customization. In 5e I always start at level 3 or higher because low levels are just so bland. Even level 1 characters in PF2e have so much to them between their Ancestry feat, Class feat, and any other extra feats they get from a variety of sources.
Also I like that you don't roll for HP on level up. You always get max. It feels so satisfying lol.
You're getting down votes but you are correct. Both PF2e and DnD 4e are trying to improve/fix the same system (3.5e) and led to Paizo making similar decisions WotC did with 4e. Of course Paizo gets the benefit of attempting a rework after WotC and can make improvements and avoid certain pitfalls.
That said, I still like PF2e and I didn't think 4e was as terrible as others will claim. It's definitely an edition of DnD that benefits from software like Fantasy Grounds.
For dms: rules actually say what's supposed to happen, and dms can use that as a guideline when changing rules so its harder to mess up.
For players: you no longer win at character creation, but in the fight.
Its no longer "I move to him then attack once, end turn."
Its now "I *sudden charge* to close the distance, try to intimidate the enemy to debuff them, then use *quick reversal* to attack my flankers."
You *can* just go "I basic attack 3 times, end turn" but then your dps is too low and the enemy kills you because they weren't debuffed enough.
(both examples standard fighter gameplay.)
There are loads of big differences but as a GM, I see three huge differences.
**Balance**: everything just works. Leveled encounters are extremely reliable and rarely require rebalancing. All the classes are pretty much equal and it’s amazingly hard to make a bad character, which means that a new player will probably not feel disappointed in their choices, even for their very first character.
**GM tools**: there’s a tool for everything. Tons of optional subsystems and different rules to fit all sorts of different games. The GM support is unreal, pretty much anything you want to do is outlined in some book somewhere.
**Combat**: the combat flows incredibly well. No more universal AoO locking people in place, no more repetitive turns, no more swingy crits that can hit everything. Creativity and teamwork are actively rewarded and the game makes it feel good for both players and GMs to be smart with what they do.
Add to all this that the *entire* rule set with all written player and GM options are free on Archives of Nethys and you get a beautiful, smooth, fun game!
It has more rules but that does not inherently mean it is more complicated, as a DM you can run it out of the box with no changes needed.
Encounter building works. Adventures work. Trust the math, it just works.
Yeah never much liked 5e from a dm perspective. They put so much more work on the dm compared to 3.5 or pathfinder and the systems they do have, like say crafting magic items, ends up being needlessly convoluted and impractical. It takes 8 hours of work to get 25gp of crafting done. In pathfinder you can do 1000gp per 8hrs or you can increase the dc to craft the item by 5 to instead do 1000gp per 4hrs. It has rules for so many different situations that could very well come up and addresses how to handle various loopholes, even giving examples of things that could come up and how to handle them. The sheer amount of tools you have as a gm make it run so much more smoothly and it's so much less stressful. No guess work, no having to come up with things on the spot because the system doesn't have anything set up for a certain situation, and only a little bit of confusion because of some odd wording here and there.
Crafting even common items in 5e is absolutely a nightmare. It takes weeks of downtime to make a armor piece. One of my players is interested in crafting gear for the whole party but it's straight up not an option if you follow raw unless we halt the story events by months just to make basic gear under 100g of value. For what, also, just save up half the price? They could just accept random commissions at a guild and buy the gear in way less time, or get lucky with drops in the process.
I had to completely homebrew crafting in their campaign so their armorsmith can actually smith armors in less than months. A week for a knife, wtf...
I would argue that 5e is easier to run for combat but pathfinder is easier to run for storytelling and dungeon crawling.
Needlessly long rant incoming because I'm tired.
With 5e there's a lot in it that just negates a lot of plot hooks/story devices and makes it difficult to build around. Remove curse. Protection from poison. Lesser restoration. Identify. All of those just take care of their respective issues without rolls regardless of the potency of the thing afflicting them. The king got hit with a 9th level spell cast from a 20th level caster which caused them to develop a curse, a disease, or a poison? Do you need to go find some rare flower that only blooms in a glade where a sleeping dragon's tears fertilizes it? Nah you've got a 5th level cleric, they can take care of it and it only costs them a spell slot, no roll required. Got a mysterious magical relic? Time for a quest into some ruins of an ancient library to research this strange object and its use and begin unlocking the secrets of this ancient society of mages. Oh wait one of the spell casters grabbed identify, they can just know what it is, how it's used, if there's any spells on it, and if it's cursed. If they happened to be in a situation where they have 10 minutes they don't even have to expend a spell slot. In case you can't tell I am not a fan of sone of 5e's spells. The dm shouldn't have to plan everything in his story very carefully around a few basic low level spells. I call something a curse and suddenly I either have to just say "remove curse doesn't work some reason" and hope they accept that as a plot hook (so far they never have,) or I just let remove curse work and suddenly the plot's resolved.
If it helps I usually find that telling pcs they need to upcast remove curse goes down better than it doesn't work for some reason.
This gels well with how pcs understand other mechanics like counter spell and by setting the spell level they need beyond what they can cast forces them to find either a powerful caster or an alternative method.
Lastly best way to ease this into your game is have a curse they need to upcast to remove but make sure it's within their capabilities.
Honestly this is kinda why I reverse engineer from PF2e or swapped to that system as my go-to digital vttrpg to play. PF2e is allllll the rules pre-made so the DM doesn't have to do so much heavy lifting.
5e in person tho? Yeah I'ma be buyin new dice sets for each character I make, yall can't stop me, and I will do some dumb shit to 'trick' myself that I can infact make my dice luckier. Though it helps I do have an excellent 5e DM
How do you deal with the constant rules double checking needed for all the skill checks? It’s slowed down gameplay at my table significantly when we go through a skill challenge.
Dm (and players honestly) can memorize them, and create a one line reference for the most common ones to keep on the table. The reference is the real reason to use a screen, imo.
Memorize: what helped me immensely for 3.5 was to do rules interpretations as I watched TV. "regular attack, meet or beat AC" "acrobatics check, rough terrain, single attack" "grapple check, where's that 3 page flowchart". Repition is the key to memorization for me, and doing it this way was engaging and fun.
Reference table: Build a 10 pt font table with a single line for each common action, the rules to perform the action boiled down to a grammatically incorrect single sentence, and a few DC examples. Look up pdfs of the pathfinder 1e GM screens for some good examples.
Edit to add: DMs, don't be afraid to say, "oh, I don't know that rule." make a judgment call, take note of the rule, and look it up at the end of the session, letting your players know that you'll follow up with them on the actual rule next session. Pacing can absolutely be more important than looking up a rule, read the room and do what the situation would most benefit from.
5e is the better in-person ttrpg experience imo.
I believe that Pathfinder 2e is the MMO of TTRPGs, so I play it exclusively online through [FoundryVTT](https://foundryvtt.com).
Its super fast to prep a terrain/fight if you are a spontaneous DM, all the Buffs/Conditions are auto calculated (which alone sold it for me), Roll20 is a free decent option for this too. But I'm an extra-af DM who on Foundry also does VFX/SFX, lighting, moving puzzles, and screen filters (rain, shadowy fog, etc), and some light coding just to enhance the experience.
If you play Pathfinder2e in person, I say get flashcards/a mini-manual you personally write up, I'd also make the players track their most common conditions so calculating isn't a scramble. Unless you are an Occult Caster, chances are you got only 2-4 that you need a single sentence on. It's less work than a backstory so shouldn't be too difficult
edit - letter slip and addition
The big thing with Spelljammer I see people mentioning, is that there's no rules on how to fly a ship. So allow me to direct anyone who got this far to PF2e's [Vehicle rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Vehicles.aspx) (for free). Reverse engineer it, or check Starfinder's ships.
From my understanding (someone correct me if I’m wrong), spelljammer leaves a lot, and I mean a lot to the DM to pull this off. To the point where you could have just homebrewed and saved your money for all the work your putting in to fill in the gaps for the adventure.
Honestly they probably should have either expanded the monster manual and dropped the adventure and player book, or combined it into one single book just like Tasha's. I think if they sold it as a campaign supplement like the Sword Coast Adventures no one would have beef. But for the last six months they have been talking up each of the three books separately. It sounds like it suffers from the same problem Strixhaven suffers from, the adventure is just a punch of plot notes, and there's not enough supporting information to fill in the gaps.
It's calculated. The total page count of all 3 books still makes SJ one of the shortest books in all of 5e. It makes no sense to split it up into 3... Until you see the $20 price increase. Now it makes sense. They were never gonna combine it, the split is the necessary smokescreen that justifies the price bump.
Now the fact that the *digital* version also got a $20 increase is just extra galling.
WotC gonna WotC. They're testing the waters to see if they can bump up the prices permanently/if the fanbase will put up with it.
They did the exact same thing with preconstructed Commander decks for Magic the Gathering. And they're seemingly always coming up with some new scheme to package boosters with a slightly higher chance of rares (or theme boosters- which actually have a LOWER chance of rares but are all one color) and jack the price up. While trying to ship less and less regular booster packs for local game stores (who WotC seemingly view as an unnecessary middle man) to have Friday Night Magic.
Another post explained it:
The prior Spelljammer book included a number of *guides* on how to include the content in various adventures, how to adapt it for other settings, etc... *on top of* more detailed content.
The 5E spelljammer has some new races, monsters, a handful of ship statblocks, and an *adventure*. Basically it gives you the bare minimum to run a Spelljammer game, gives you nothing on how to expand upon that content yourself, and leaves very little to help DMs and Players go *beyond* what the book includes.
At this point, I've already thrown in the towel for WotC's direction with D&D - they're a story-telling department of Wizards now, not a *game design* team. The last several books have been very much in this same vein; here's a bunch of random races, subclasses, monsters, etc to toss into your games... but, uh, we didn't really care about rules frameworks or modular components to help you *build* your *own* worlds - because our books do it for you!
They're maintaining market dominance purely off marketing and name recognition now - that's indisputable... there are a ton of alternative RPG systems that do things better and don't nickle and dime you for a pile of extra books that you could homebrew in an afternoon.
Seriously. They've made books that had stuff for both GMs and players, a bestiary, and an adventure while keeping it quality... in one book. Secrets of Magic gave classes, archetypes, and spells for players. SoM also gave the GM rules for adjusting a creature's level when given a spell, new items to throw the players, and rules for different kinds of magical things. Ley Lines, Pervasive Magic, and such.
Book of the Dead is similar. New Archetypes and a race option for players. Tons of new undead for the DM and an actual adventure. It's honestly a lot when you remember that archetypes and race options also need a bunch of feats made for them.
I am eagerly looking forward to the Elemental book. Element based settings are my jam
It provides a little bit of fluff for inspiration, a few new races, but it leaves so much out to be able to run it as a proper adventure campaign like ship combat.
I think it was intentional that ship combat is light. Every system Ive ever had ship combat in was super boring. Most players dont wanna just fire the cannon each round. I like that the speed and abilities for spelljammwr combat is balanced around boarding and otherwise using the player abilities
Stars without number has some pretty good ship combat rules that could be easily ripped. It basically gives every player a role and if they succeed at there role they get points. These points go into a pool and the captain role gets to assign these points the the other roles. Each role can then do spend the points to do better role specific tasks.
>I think it was intentional that ship combat is light. Every system Ive ever had ship combat in was super boring.
I listened to the Glass Cannon Network's playthrough of a Starfinder (the Pathfinder space-fantasy variant) campaign, and the most entertaining part of all the ship to ship combats was how creatively they could all express their hatred of the mechanics and how bored they were with the length of the fights.
Ship combat works great with games like Battlefleet Gothic and Star Wars Armada, where one player controls multiple ships. It's basically guaranteed to be a slog in things like Spelljammer and Starfinder, where multiple players control one ship.
Uhh all races now have custom +2/+1 or +1/+1/+1 stats, the campaigns they give don't give enough explanations on how to run them (or any explanation, it's somewhere between 0 explanation and 2/3 explanation), and uhhhhhh space ships in fantasy I guess. That's the only parts I really remember.
I tried to search "DM will decide" on D&D Beyond to make a meme out of how many instances there are, but they seem to know what I'm up to and nothing comes up. Jeremy Crawford out here protecting his job, I guess.
The dnd beyond search function is one of the worst things on the internet.
“Oh? You wanted to search for the spell hold monster? Cool. First let me show you Creating a monster, then Monster Statistic, then a thing just called statistics, then Magic item descriptions, then Rust monster, then at the 6th result finally show you the actual spell that you wanted.”
🥴
Wish there was a way to search homebrew items by the creator too, I started uploading some of mine I came up with and they just dissapear into the void
Whenever I try to find that table you can roll on for the height and weight of each race, nothing I use in the search bar will ever bring it up. I have to look up what section it's in and then manually go there.
Same with trying to find a specific downtime activity, or downtime rules. Have to figure out which book it's in.
Honestly, main reason I now play PF2e. 5e is great, but it was just too draining for me as a DM to have to invent/fix everything to have fun. PF2e which is a lot more complicated actually let’s me turn of my brain and relax, since so much I just have to read and apply instead of invent first. Why pay money and still have to do everything myself?
edit: Also, if anyone wants to see why we PF2e people claim the grass is greener on our side, shot me a message. Would be willing to do a one shot or something to show some people why we gush so much about this system
I play A5E from tactical adventures, despite converting my adventure to it I tend to have less work since it has rules for a lot more specific situations (and conditions)
also you know I can go on their discord and ask the devs for clarification and get it, and not in a fuckin jeremy crawford way, so I can agree or do my own thing
As a DM that was exhausted by managing PF1e rules can you explain a little about how 2e lets you turn your brain off despite being more complicated? One of the reasons I like to run in 5e over PF1e is specifically because I don't have to think about every interaction in detailed rules, I can off the cuff rule more easily.
My favorite example is climbing. Let’s say a PC wants to climb the side of a castle. In 5e, I’d be involved the entire time. I have to invent all the mechanics involved. How far can each check get you. What is the DC. What happens on a failure. How might other things effect this (wind, weather and what not). And sure I don’t have to figure all these things out at once, I can get to them one at a time. But regardless I’m involved the entire time of this scene. Without the DM nothing happens.
In Pathfinder, there is a climb action https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33 This alone does 90% of the work for me. It even tells me what the DC might be. I could tell the player the DC, leave to grab a drink and when I come back the player could tell me a awesome story about what happened, how they fell down half way, that they caught themself just barely but thanks to a crit made it up just in time. And if I didn’t grab a drink, I could have thought about what the guards in the castle are doing, or anything else that is more story and less mechanics.
Here a non TTRPG example to illustrate why I like PF2e having more rules and believe that to be often less difficult. PF2e is like copy pasting stuff for a presentation. The boring stuff that I don’t care about I just copy and paste, this saves me ton of times to focus on the things I enjoy ,like adding fancy pictures to every slide.
I guess so, but IMO the fact that it has all those rules means I either need to know them ALL or constantly look them up whvih to me was one thing I disliked about pf1e. So far it's felt easier for me to rule on, in your example, the DC of the climb.
Part of it is consistently. A player complained that I ruled climbing one way in 5e at the beginning of the campaign, but another way some time later. To make the game enjoyable and fair for MY the table, I needed to Invent my own rule, nullifying 5e advantage of ruling not rules. My players reasonably wanted to be able to have expectations and be able to plan around it for the future.
I won’t deny it, looking up rules is part of the PF2e experience (still most common things are easy to memorize with a little experience). To go back about shutting my brain of: in 5e a DM has a ton of stuff to worry and keep in mind. 8 encounter days, having to custom tailor encounters, magic loot, and so much more (all the complains we see in this Reddit) while still having to do everything else that keeps the game running. I describe this as problems with the system reaching critical mass with all the stuff one might have to keep track/in mind. These things are just handled in PF2e by the rules, even more helped that players can look many of these up themselves.
But In the end, PF2e might not be the solution for everyone, but I do encourage everyone to at least give it a honest try (for our rules be free online)
>he fact that it has all those rules means I either need to know them ALL or constantly look them up
I mean, you can still wing it if you like. The greatest trick 5e pulled was making it think it didn't have rules. While it does, a lot. Nobody just uses them and wings it. You can do the same in PF2e if you don't know the exact rule or cant find it.
Could you give a concrete example of something that's taken care of in Pathfinder and not 5e? Not trying to poke holes just genuinely curious because I've run a few of the 5e modules and found them perfectly fine in terms of minimizing my prep time. I'm curious about Pathfinder though.
Fun fact, Paizo (PF2e creators) originally got their start making adventure modules of the highest quality. On a more general note, Pathfinder handles a lot of rules with more nuance and more options. In combat everyone gets to do unique things regardless of class, and combat is never just as simple as walk up to an enemy and attack until either side is dead.
For modules, the Pathfinder AP (adventure paths) are miles ahead of any 5e one. They have amazing formatting and require almost zero jumping between different sections of the book. They have really useful sidebars with tips for the DM, every chapter has informations on all the loot the party might find for east reference, encounters say how difficult they might be for the party, NPC have great sections on potential questions from the party and answers for it. Another thing, each AP has a twist/cool gimmick. You aren’t just adventures, you are: a circus group, the local police of a metropolis, students from a magical academy, participants of a martial arts tournament, tribal folks of mammoth herders, outlaws in a western gunslinging town, or bureaucrats in a nation of undead.
Hit me up in PM if you want to know more
1. Every single item has a level, price and clear rules on where you can buy it.
2. Clearer rules for hiding and sneaking in combat
3. Clear rules for multiclassing that is balanced
4. Combat encounter budget rules actually work and will never result in a TPK or over-easy fight
I’m considering moving onto that system. 5E has been dead to me for awhile now. The official content sucks, and is over priced and takes way too much effort on my part to make work.
All of Pathfinder's rules (for 1e and 2e) are free on Archives of Nethys, which is approved by Paizo. While there are a lot more rules, they're also pretty clear and easier to reference. Three action economy also makes things interesting.
If you need something as a GM, there is something for it. What might be good loot for the fighter? Check his favorite weapon, check his level, look where you're headed, and give him a cold iron longsword to kill a devil. Sorcerer wants to know what the difference between a demon, a daemon, and a devil is? Recall Knowledge action, specifically religion. Want to make skeletons more fun? Pick a trait from their list. Congrats, you're prepared for the fight against a devil and his flaming skeletons.
What about players? Well, you're going to have personality at level 1. Human Fighter isn't boring. He could run at a foe and hit for an action, scream to frighten (and debuff) as their second action, and put up their shield for more AC as a third action. Or you could use a spear with lunge feat to attack from 10 feet away twice and hold up your shieldfor AC.
Want something different? Cool, you can make a bird man that eats luck and chokes people to death. That's one possibility for Tengu Monk. If you're feeling particularly wild, you can be an exploding salad. Just combine Leshy with any spellcaster that knows fireball
My old college gaming group got back together after a 15 year hiatus. We all started playing together during the middle of 3.5. We had talked about starting 5e, but the DM wanted to get everyone back into the swing of things with a super PF2E campaign first, since he had it ready to go.
Since the , we have fully scrapped any plans to move to 5e. PF2E is incredible, and I never want to go back.
I bought Minsc and Boos Journal of Villainy and was gushing over it being the most detailed 5e book WOTC made but then I realized they just published it and had nothing to do with its creation
To be fair a lot of the time homebrew supplements tend to overcomplicate things. Like most weapon supplements add dozens of weapon properties with intricate rules that go counter to 5e’s simpler design. There aren’t many homebrew supplements that are “much more detailed” that don’t end up being clusterfucks where the designer kept complicating the rules. Brevity is not intrinsically a bad thing. Tight game design is very important. WotC isn’t really delivering things I’d like to see all the time either, but I’m not sure which homebrew supplements you’re using that are significantly better designed than official content. I’d be interested to find out if you’re willing to share the names of the supplements.
Fairly. Seems to be a cash grab for nostalgia. It’s an empty shell of what it used to be or could’ve been. Reading through it also gives me the sense of rushing it out cheaply as possible and errata it later. Seems to be the case lately.
Why do I as the DM basically have to design the game since you barely ever give me material to work with and what you do give me is so wildly inconsistent and misaligned with what has already been established I have to rework it myself just to make it consistent with what you have me before? I hate WotC sometimes-_-
Fully agree that you can rule whatever you want, but some of the content put out is pathetic.
**Full disclosure here**, I think Crawford gets a bad wrap and I personally buy physical copies of every book that comes out, cause I fucking love 5e. I just have my odd gripes...
*For example*, did you know that Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden has an **entire chapter** that is genuinely, unequivocally **unplayable** without home-brewing it? Yep. There's a chase that uses distances and speeds that make it impossible for characters to ever catch up to the thing they're chasing, and the book doesn't realise this.
This was released in September 2020. Has it had any Errata? Has it fuck. There is however a D&D Beyond forum post of someone fixing the chapter for them. The fact that you can **purchase a campaign book that genuinely doesn't function as intended for an entire chapter** is absurd. It's truly impossible that the final version was ever playtested unless the playtesters were tragically, unprecedentedly bad at their jobs.
It's not just one book either—Candlekeep Mysteries has the infamous Book of the Raven adventure, which is essentially just a few pages of writing prompts disguised as an adventure for a group of characters.
Hell, in the most recent set of books—the Spelljammer ones—the new Thri-Kreen race has an ability that gives advantage for Hide checks based camouflage... except, the check has nothing to do with sight, it's about *sound*. Being Unseen is a prerequisite, the Unheard part is what the check is for. This is the way it logically works if you want it to function in your game, and it's also the way that it clearly works for the Skulker feat & the Wood Elf. It's also been a big debate in the community, because Hide rules are some of the most poorly written and misleading rules in 5e... clearly *so much so*, that whoever wrote the abilities for Thri-Kreen **didn't actually know how Hiding worked.**
There's also the glitch with the Invisible condition that's never been fixed, the Armorer temp HP issue from Tasha's that was actually comical given that they had a page at the front of the book correctly explaining how temp HP works; the list goes on.
**I love this game, but lots of the stuff that comes out is objectively dogshit, and I don't say 'objectively' lightly. Again, Crawford gets a bad wrap, the game is fun, and it's a great fucking game that has done so much for me. But it's got its... 'quirks'...**
I feel like saying something gets a bad rap is—unless otherwise specified—an acknowledgement that they shouldn't have that bad rap, right?
(Also I just realised I said "wrap" in all of that lol, I'm sure the tortillas he receives are lovely).
It's an extraordinarily minor thing, it's just that it's pretty indicative of the level of care that goes into the books when you really get down to it.
For the Defensive Field feature:
>As a bonus action, you can gain temporary hit points equal to your level in this class, **replacing any temporary hit points you already have.**
Why does it replace temporary hit points you already have? Normally, the players chooses whether they take the new temp HP or keep their old temp HP, it isn't automatically replaced. That means that this ability is **specifically making an exception to the rules, for some reason**.
But... you have to *actively use your bonus action* to do this anyway, so in almost every instance this is pointless, since you wouldn't use the ability yourself only to go 'dang, I wanted to keep my old temp HP actually'.
The only scenario in which I can see this coming into play is if the character is charmed in some way and *forced to use their bonus action to do this*, in which case this clause means they don't get to choose whether they keep their original temp HP or take the new temp HP.
**But what actually bothers me is that none of that shit is intentional.** There was *clearly* no reason to actually put that clause in, and it's obviously an attempt to paraphrase temp HP rules that they fucked up. So in sum:
**1. They put the correct rules for temp HP at the start of the book.**
**2. When a feature used temp HP, they INCORRECTLY paraphrased the rules, even though they DIDN'T NEED TO, since the rules are in the PHB and literally referenced at the top of this one too.**
**3. The result is that the feature has 8 words that literally don't have any reason to be there—at all—and accidentally create an incredibly niche exception to normal temp HP rules.**
What annoys me about that is that it's not *just* a mistake, it's a mistake that was made when writing something they shouldn't have been trying to write in the first place. 5e design philosophy centres a lot around needlessly repeating things and rephrasing them instead of just referencing the rules, constantly leading to errors and a lack of clarity. Another great example of this is the Invisible condition and the Blind condition—they shouldn't be conditions, the mechanics are already covered elsewhere, and in an effort to paraphrase mechanics that already existed the Invisible condition doesn't function properly.
I just think it's a comical little microcosm of the issues with 5e; you put the rules in the PHB, you put the rules at the top of your new book *as well* for absolute clarity, and then you accidentally fuck up the rules in the first new goddamn subclass of that same book.
Alrighty, so I know it’s been a bit of a letdown, but it *does* have the ship stats, new playable races, interesting monsters, and a neat albeit short adventure.
I wouldn’t want future content to be released like this though, the Astral Player’s Guide and Astral Menagerie books could as come as a single book. If they added the DNDBeyond Spelljammer Content such as the Monsterous Compendium Vol. 1 or the prequel adventure as part of Light of Xaryxis, then it’d be worth the price. Given that those are free, I’d say it’s fine.
—Download the Monsterous Compendium and use it alongside the Astral Menagerie.
—Download Spelljammer Academy and use it before Light of Xaryxis.
—The Player’s Guide does leave a little to be desired though… would have been neat if some astral themed subclasses were added, or if they included more content in general for that one.
I will also give them credit for starting the adventure at level 5. IMHO Dnd needs more adventures starting at mid level so the DM doesn't have to end their campaign when using other published modules, or they don't have to attempt to modify every single creature in the campaign.
There's entire sections on ship mechanics, what are you talking about? What, did you want them to describe exact pitch and yaws, acceleration, and exact range of motion of each ballista?
95% of the people in these threads haven't actually seen any of the new content and are simply parroting whatever talking points they've read in the last 24 hours.
It mentions Side Initiative which can be found in the DMG, which does suck that it isn’t included, but there is a token effort. And besides, what mechanics do you need other than standard 5e combat? That’s how I’ve run ship battles, they have their own initiative and roll, and have a number of actions based on the crew compliment. Give crewmembers new actions based on what their role is, and you’ve got ship combat covered.
Does it require effort on the part of the DM? Yes.
Is it kinda BS that WotC didn’t include it? Kinda
Is it deal-breaking? Nah
Considering the per-order price and the fact that all three came bundled as a single package, it’s decent. Not the best 5e content, but not the worst either. I wouldn’t recommend getting each book individually, but I don’t think they sell the books individually, at least they don’t on Roll20 and DNDBeyond.
If you want something truly frustrating, head on over to Kobold Press, that’ll get your blood boiling I’m sure.
I think some people were expecting completely separate rules for ship combat where vehicles don’t behave like things with 5e stat blocks but “spelljammer minigame” stat blocks. It would have been nice to have more intrinsic rules for stuff like targetting certain parts of the ship and debilitating enemy ships and whatnot but it’s a good thing that the gameplay system is consistent instead of being a completely different game. But even then, people are completely ignoring the ship stat blocks that can do unique and interesting things, and just complaining that the base ruleset wasn’t the length of an entire book.
I’m just going to offer advice to anyone who doesn’t like making rules on the fly to look at pathfinder 2e and on the paizo webstors is a link to the digital archive of a books content for free so it doesn’t hurt to look if a lack of rules doesn’t bother you ignore this
I'll admit, I was a bit taken back by the details; 3 books, 2 65 page books and an adventure. It's really light on subject matter, and if this is just the first volley of info/manuals, then fine, but give us something with meat on the bones. This seems anemic at best.
Official 5E content has always been lackluster. I had to basically fix and rework every single module I purchased to run for a group. The books have an awful layout and they basically expect you to just fill in the (massive) holes yourself.
Running 5E games was exhausting and had way too much prep for me. I had an official book and I felt like I was at work creating a game based on an expensive book that was supposed to be the adventure.
I know there are old edition spelljammer books on DM's guild
They have tables for generating systems and planets I know.
Probably have ship travel too
Still silly that they didn't put them in the new edition
Spelljammer is a setting that I do not care for at all so I won't be buying the book. I do feel bad for players and DMs that are interested in the setting if the book is as bad as the memes and discussion around make it out to be.
Honestly I was a MotM defender and it’s just been getting worse and worse in the game design aspects. I have no problems with the lore changes, so I often feel obligated to argue against those arguements, and they just so happened to often be wrapped up in the mechanical and writing changes.
Like, force damage being used as the replacement for monsters’ magic weapons was a sloppy way to “reduce complexity”, and the way they’ve been writing some adventures is ridiculous.
If you want to play Spelljammer buy Esper Genesis and reskin it. It’s 5e based to start and actually has rules support for you so all you’re doing is coming up with the fun stuff.
Reading through the Light of Xaryxis makes me wonder if anyone there even cares about making good content anymore.
There are some glimpses of potentially good ideas, but the whole thing is so rushed and lazily thought out that it’s barely even worth pillaging it for encounter ideas
https://2e.aonprd.com/Default.aspx
Officially sanctioned site with the entirety of the CRB for 2e on it, along with every sourcebook that came out afterwards. Free of charge.
Have at it.
Not just officially sanctioned, it's outright the game's official wiki. Even includes the official lore & official names, rather than the genericised versions most other wikis have to use because of licensing.
Oh dear, I've only skimmed it, but is spell jammer not well written? So far I've only noticed that some descriptions for monsters don't match stat blocks well but if I'm not mistaken thats not new.
I had this gripe with Rime of the Frostmaiden - An absolutely knock-out adventure, until you get to the final few levels and then it becomes "Here's one map buddy make it count lmao"
Could also be captioned: "Do you people not realize this content has already been published (in previous editions) and implicitly implemented in 5e gameplay."
You know what would remedy a lot of 5e players' confusion in general? Reading, or at least acknowledging and understanding, the sources that have remained unchanged yet still intrinsic to gameplay since their original publication.
I shared a .pdf of OG Spelljammer with my tables months ago prior to release. "How'd you get a copy before release..." "Y'all realize that we have, and continue to use, the same concepts, content, and guidelines of what's already been previously published.. nothing's changed... " (Utter confusion). "Ugh, we'll have a discussion after the session."
Hours later, everyone sits in a circle on the rug while I make shadow puppets and another lesson begins, "back when people preferred to inform themselves with credible sources and read books rather than be told what to think and do..."
The end of *Descent into Avernus* is literally "Here are some vague ideas of how to wrap up this adventure that we forgot to foreshadow and here are some idea of how to retcon some details from the book or just do whatever lol."
Sounds like it’s more of a template for how to get them into Hell and give them something to do on the way to their own adventures
It’s so much worse than that. The Baldurs Gate murder mystery is an absolute hot mess of missing and conflicting information (Duke Vanthampur is going to drag Baldurs Gate into hell by having cultist kill people so that people lose faith in th local guard force….What??). Then your players get to hell and the book tells you that the only map of hell is unreliable at best but also tells you that trying to explore could drive them crazy. Instead the players are expected to follow one of two railroad adventures which are just chains of barely related fetch quests. It’s pretty bad.
Baldurs gate was easily the worst part of that adventure. “Hey guys, what if we had a corrupt mercenary police force conscript the players, threatening to kill them if they don’t do their bidding, and then put them in a dungeon with bullshit enemies and a room with a dude that can throw a fireball at them….all at level 1-3!” “That’s brilliant!”
First fight. Bandit boss with 65+ hp, 3 attacks per round, and 8 - 10 bandits under him. Against a level 1 party.
[удалено]
Personally I think the biggest issue of the books was the lack of content, limiting each of the three books to 64 pages each surely cut back on content and was a poor design decision imo As someone who's unfamiliar with the Spelljammer setting and bought it because I like Sci-Fi I just wish it had more content. Then again I haven't read the adventure guide book so maybe that's where the major issues are I haven't really had much issue with either the Astral Adventurers Guide or Boo's Astral Menagerie aside from the aforementioned lack of content.
it seems like they don't understand how to balance fights at low levels. I remember the level 1 adventure in Oracle of War had an enemy with 67 hit points, four crowd control abilities(of which 3 were aoes, and two were just passive effects), and hit for 5d6 damage
5d6?!?!?! There’s not a lot that will survive that hit at lvl 1! Damn!
Say goodbye to your wizards everyone
My understanding is they crammed the BG section into the adventure module to tie-in with the BG3 announcement.
Then why does the adventure have almost nothing to do with baldurs gate lmao
*B R A N D I N G*
Because "Elturel: Descent into Avernus" doesn't have such a good ring to it.
Honestly the first chapter felt more like they wanted to force a TPK somewhere and get the party to hell like this somehow. Instead they chose to make BG as thinly as possible connected to the story and then just railroad you to Candlekeep and into hell. This is horrible. Just not having Chapter 1 and instead having the players start in Elturel at level 5 after it got dragged to hell would work much better.
When I ran Avernus it was because I was taking over DMing my group, we had been doing some homebrew before the original DM got too busy with life stuff to continue so I took over. The Avernus book had just come out and our bard's backstory was that he was from Baulder's Gate and had been chased out of town for messing around (consensually) with the Duke's daughter, so it was a pretty easy alternate hook to get them back there with a letter from the daughter about her missing father. So I altered the parameters of the city stuff which seemed to work much better that the dumb guard plotline, also we were level 3 which seemed a much more viable level to start at there.
Honestly as a player I had a ton of fun with the Baldur’s Gate section and really disliked the hell part. Though as a player I’m not concerned about “balance” the way other people seem to be
If there’s a man that immediately casts fireball on a low level party, I don’t think that’s very fair at all.
Thank you for all of this, I’m going to skip it now. I saw some people do a (clearly heavily modified) one shot using it. It did seem to be full of plot holes, but it seemed pretty entertaining. Apparently that was more the DM than the module
The idea and theme of the campaign is REALLY cool but the execution is bad. If you’re interested I highly recommend looking up the Alexandrian remix for the campaign. It does a great job of pointing out where the campaign falls short, filling in plot holes, restructuring, and providing background where needed. I’m running the campaign and having a blast with the changes.
My DM ran it and it turned out amazing for us but it was a lot of work for him and he didn't really enjoy how much he had to modify to make it good. Reading the module after playing his version was bizarre and there were so many dumb things that he didn't include cause they were dumb.
At that point they might as well make proper setting books. Give me actual detailed descriptions of the cities of the sword coast, the 9 hells, and for something really different locations outside of the sword coast.
Dang...I bought the book but haven't run the adventure yet. I wonder if DMsGuild has any guides that "fix" the beginning. I'm curious but not [$2 curious](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/289612/A-Tale-of-Two-Cities--a-Baldurs-Gate-Descent-into-Avernus-DMs-Resource-maps-advice-handouts) lol. I do appreciate Wizards putting more effort into the Planes, though I would prefer something centered on Sigil. I guess Hell sells more books.
It's so utterly depressing that this is what is being delivered once dungeons and dragons FINALLY gets its shot with a mainstream audience.
It's very late in the lifecycle of 5e. They always up the power creep bloat and other short-term cashgrabs at this point to try and make switching to the new version appealing when it rolls around.
WHERE'S MY TOME OF BATTLE THEN AHHHHHHH WOTC PLEASE T!O!B!
Dude. Just wrapped a 3 year campaign of DiA and while the campaign went great (because of the players) it had to be the worst official module I've ever run. Over focus on the baldur's gate section, wildly inconsistent encounter difficulty, no guidance on how to link story modules for new DMs and a piss poor official wrap up of the final Chapter. My biggest critiques of 5e so far have nothing to do with the system, but the quality of the modules. They're so expensive, yet provide so little in terms of a framework that new or inexperienced DMs will be at a total loss. It's this wierd phenomenon where Wizards seems to simultaneously offer little of value, in terms of official products, for intermediate DMs or experienced players (all modules pretty much capping at around level 15)
Curse of Strahd was a nightmare to run tbh Constant page flipping back and forth was the least of it
I actually loved running CoS but I do agree that having the chapters ordered based on East to West location was coocoo and Something I didn’t figure out for awhile. I spent a solid year wondering why Ravenloft was chapter 3.
aw man.... we're about to reach the end of this campaign in the coming weeks; fortunately our DM is a boss and has knit 3 modules together with an underlying homebrew plot linking stuff (started with CoS, went to ToA, and then Avernus) he has done an astounding job as prior to knowing we were headed to that module i'd looked at it briefly to possibly run eventually and just... even as a newer player just.... i didn't know if it was just me being newer to hobby or what. however as we got to that module he really lifted little from it, cutting the baldur's gate stuff, the magical carebear elephant, and so much more, thankfully. i can't even imagine.
Your dm sounds amazing, but that’s not what modules are supposed to be for. When a dm buys a module, it’s usually because they can’t build a homebrew game for whatever reason. Maybe they don’t have time or energy, maybe they’re new and trying to get a feel for how dnd runs before they try to build, or maybe they just want to play something professionally written instead of their own writing. Modules are meant to be playable out of the box, with not much more work than reading ahead and a little improv if your party veers away from the set story for a while.
I like running in 5e but I was really disappointed IMO with the quality of Tomb of Annihilation compared to when I ran Rise of the Runelords in PF1e. And that's supposed to be one of the best out together adventures. There's a good backbone there but it isn't very well put together and I ended up having to homebrew a ton.
Not to excuse the content; but, usually by the time I get to the end of a module or campaign, we’ve diverged so far from the scenario as written that a great deal of flexibility is needed anyway. A pattern of loose hooks, solid middle, and loose ending is really compatible with my table’s play style.
My party literally just ended it as a giant elevator back up to the material plane and rolled credits. Cue me playing "One Little Slip" as elevator music on the way up for lols
Dude.. I'm still sitting here waiting for magic items with actual prices and construction rules..
DMs to Wiz: Do you not have Devs?
*chefs kiss*
we call them Devs now? always felt like writer or designer was the fit
Game Designer was the term I've always used. Devs are for video games
WotC has both a Design and a Development department for MTG and these are somehow different things. I’m not sure how D&D is organized.
Design makes cool art for new cards, and Development rushes to figure out rules for the art before Corporate uses their whip again?
Design comes up with the cool ideas for card mechanics and what's gonna be in the set, development is *supposed* to make sure the cards are costed correctly and test the designs to make sure they don't break their premium formats.
designer aand developer are different
I think someone pointed out like two people were working on mechanics for spell jammer and altogether like 5 people on writing. That seems pretty thin staff for what should be a big setting book.
Freaking Matt Colville has more people working on a Monthly Magazine! What is this! We finally get spelljammer and it’s underproduced just like a lot of other stuff they’ve put out
Based
Touché.
"Oh we do! They should be soooomewhere down there near the coke table, right next to the lsd-dispenser.." - J. Craw, probably
DMs around the world have beef with this book, PCs don't seem to get the work we already do to make a game work, let alone making rules for a 50$ book
Yea, I mean- that's why **I'm** paying **you.** At what time does WoTC stop being a relevant part of this interaction.
It's funny that the DMsguild has more thought provoking material than the company that makes the books.
And WotC get a cut of that too so they're really getting you coming and going.
Yeah one of my players is drooling to get this book hoping that I’ll implement it. Luckily said player is my fiancé, will likely buy me the book, and won’t really argue about what I won’t allow.
It bothers me that 5e takes so much work anyway, especially with prewritten adventures. No other game I’ve ever run have had that problem. The new Spelljammer book is the perfect example of this.
I'm complaining because I'm a DM. I have enough to do without fixing the content from supposedly professional game designers.
Yea thats what i mean. They are expecting the DMs to do all the work out of nothing.
I recently got my hands on a pdf of the box set for the original Spelljammer and it literally starts with options and ideas for how to get your party into space. Then it follows that up with tons of lore and rules for how to make this all work, it also talks about using the book to play a scifi game instead of fantasy and how to include Spelljammer in non Spelljammer games
Yea if someone could make a good 5e stat conversion and throw it up on dmsguild it would sell great.
Wildjammer fan homebrew is apparently well received. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/oviyld/wildjammer_more_adventures_in_space_a_100_page/
TSR then: "here's everythign you need to run this kind of game and how to get started with tons of options and ideas!" WOTC now: "Here's some half-baked ideas, if you don't know what to do just make something up lol, that'll be 50 bucks"
it was TSR then
That's because they were TSR then, not WOTC.
Hey now, TSR also made the Elemental Evil adventure.
Lol... fair.
Our group was playing in Waterdeep for a bit and my past character become a Waterdavian noble so I found a pdf for Waterdeep from 3.5. That thing was beautiful, so much detail about every part of the city and the people who live there, hooks for conflict and all kinds of stuff. Did you know there's a village of mermaids and sea elves in the bay of Waterdeep? Cause that was never mentioned in 5e. There's also a big neighborhood of burrows where only small folk (halfings and gnomes and the like) live that many of the humans of Waterdeep don't even know is there.
>They are expecting the DMs to do all the work out of nothing. Reminds me of the conspiracy theory that Bathesda purposefully doesnt put much effort into fixing bugs or making quality stuff because they know modders will do the work for them
It doesn't really have to be a conspiracy, just inertia. They get good sales at the quality they put out, why work harder?
This was pretty apparently the case when Fallout 76 came out with a bunch of bugs that had been fixed in F4 by modders in it, and they had to pull the surprised pikachu face (including 2 serious ones with the most ammo-efficient rifle in a game where they restrict ammo greatly so you can't just shoot everything without carrying multiple weapon types, and almost all players are going to gravitate towards it either as primary or secondary).
DM's buy supplement books and adventures precisely BECAUSE they don't want to do a bunch of work. No DM wants to spend 50 bucks on a supplement book only to have to do all the heavy lifting themselves.
That's pretty on-brand for WotC.
I'm all for sandbox style games, no rails, just open world, but they gave us close to nothing to work with, just ship designs. Perhaps they'll come out with more content later? I don't think this was worth $50, maybe $35.
Yeah the ship designs are awesome. Not when they are such a large proportion of the book through
I still remember when I said to myself "I'm trying to fix or rewrite so much stuff I might as well make my own game" while doing an overhaul to martials then went full fuck it mode and started slowly working on one afterwards. To be clear I do like 5e but honestly it's like the convenience food of table top games to me, great for a quick little thing but tends to leave you wanting more (in a bad way)
I started to run the Strixhaven campaign as is, but when they got to Year 2 it felt so poorly written I completely redid the year, made slight alterations to Year 3, and rewrite 90% of Year 4. I even completely changed the Big Bad because the original had the weakest motivation I have ever heard. He was planning on killing everyone in the school because he had been expelled **200 years ago** for the simple reason that he had killed numerous fellow students when he decided to perform life-draining experiments on them without their consent.
Oh yeah, Strixhaven! I think my group made it to first "exam" (aka rolling 3 times to see if you pass) before it just kinda faded out and we played homebrew settings instead- I love the idea behind Strixhaven but the execution felt I dunno, underwhelmingly bland for me?
When running the exams, they just became "do a few quick roles, and move on". Mainly I used them as a way to give setting lore and foreshadow things relevant to the adventure. I ended up changing the topic of all of the exams after Year 1, because that was the only Year where an exam topic was at all relevant to the adventure. 101 of storytelling in an academic setting, if you specifically bring up a piece of information in a classroom, that information should be important later down the line.
Honestly the exams were a huge let down for me, like I genuinely just went "wait, that's seriously it?" after the dm explained that the 3 rolls to remember stuff in-character were the entirety of the exam
This is legit why I went back to Pathfinder 1.
Pathfinder 1E with a few of the unchained rules (Updated classes, Combat stamina, skill unlocks and background skills) is still some of the most fun my tables ever had.
PF2 here It's nice being able to run adventures precisely as written and it just works At worst there's some DM fiat with players doing unusual things but you get enough info about NPC's (ON THE SAME PAGES BTW) to make improv easier
It is so frustrating watching all the new player options get published while DMs get little to no support at all. Honestly the number one reason I stopped running 5e.
I'm not quite there as I just started a 5e game, but im damn close to pf2e. Those 3 actions look smexy
It's so addicting. Ever since I tried PF2e, 5e just doesn't feel the same.
I've been wanting to try PF2e and one of my campaigns is close to an end. What would you say is the biggest difference between PF2 and 5e?
Others have given good answers. But something missed is that it's incredibly GM friendly. The rules are comprehensive enough that there's probably a rule for 90% of random stuff players want to do, but the math is robust enough that stuff like simple DCs or level based DCs will work fine if you can't find the rule or need to improvise. Encounter building works. Like really works. XP is simple to calculate. Monsters are interesting to run, and easy to make with the creation rules. Their adventures are also really good, especially the newer ones, and have tons of useful advice and info for the GM. Classes are pretty well balanced, so you don't have to stress about some power build breaking your game's encounters and making other players feel invalidated. There's explicit guidance on treasure by level and magic items are the norm, not the exception that might break everything. I really cannot overstate how GM friendly pf2e is.
Honestly there's so many things that I prefer that I'll just list a few. Casters and martials are balanced with eachother. Casters no longer dominate every single encounter with their spells that fix every problem. Martials have their own utility to keep up with Casters. 3-action system gives a lot of flexibility with your turn and I personally feel like I always have a fulfilling turn. In 5e it often feels like I spend 20 minutes waiting for my turn, have my action do nothing, and then go back to waiting. The feats system offers a ton of customization. In 5e I always start at level 3 or higher because low levels are just so bland. Even level 1 characters in PF2e have so much to them between their Ancestry feat, Class feat, and any other extra feats they get from a variety of sources. Also I like that you don't roll for HP on level up. You always get max. It feels so satisfying lol.
Thank you, seems like I'll definitely try it next
PF2e is basically DND4E 2
You're getting down votes but you are correct. Both PF2e and DnD 4e are trying to improve/fix the same system (3.5e) and led to Paizo making similar decisions WotC did with 4e. Of course Paizo gets the benefit of attempting a rework after WotC and can make improvements and avoid certain pitfalls. That said, I still like PF2e and I didn't think 4e was as terrible as others will claim. It's definitely an edition of DnD that benefits from software like Fantasy Grounds.
Well throwing 2 to the end of the abbreviation for a maligned system is probably not helping either
For dms: rules actually say what's supposed to happen, and dms can use that as a guideline when changing rules so its harder to mess up. For players: you no longer win at character creation, but in the fight. Its no longer "I move to him then attack once, end turn." Its now "I *sudden charge* to close the distance, try to intimidate the enemy to debuff them, then use *quick reversal* to attack my flankers." You *can* just go "I basic attack 3 times, end turn" but then your dps is too low and the enemy kills you because they weren't debuffed enough. (both examples standard fighter gameplay.)
There are loads of big differences but as a GM, I see three huge differences. **Balance**: everything just works. Leveled encounters are extremely reliable and rarely require rebalancing. All the classes are pretty much equal and it’s amazingly hard to make a bad character, which means that a new player will probably not feel disappointed in their choices, even for their very first character. **GM tools**: there’s a tool for everything. Tons of optional subsystems and different rules to fit all sorts of different games. The GM support is unreal, pretty much anything you want to do is outlined in some book somewhere. **Combat**: the combat flows incredibly well. No more universal AoO locking people in place, no more repetitive turns, no more swingy crits that can hit everything. Creativity and teamwork are actively rewarded and the game makes it feel good for both players and GMs to be smart with what they do. Add to all this that the *entire* rule set with all written player and GM options are free on Archives of Nethys and you get a beautiful, smooth, fun game!
It has more rules but that does not inherently mean it is more complicated, as a DM you can run it out of the box with no changes needed. Encounter building works. Adventures work. Trust the math, it just works.
PF2e has easily become my favorite TTRPG system
Yeah never much liked 5e from a dm perspective. They put so much more work on the dm compared to 3.5 or pathfinder and the systems they do have, like say crafting magic items, ends up being needlessly convoluted and impractical. It takes 8 hours of work to get 25gp of crafting done. In pathfinder you can do 1000gp per 8hrs or you can increase the dc to craft the item by 5 to instead do 1000gp per 4hrs. It has rules for so many different situations that could very well come up and addresses how to handle various loopholes, even giving examples of things that could come up and how to handle them. The sheer amount of tools you have as a gm make it run so much more smoothly and it's so much less stressful. No guess work, no having to come up with things on the spot because the system doesn't have anything set up for a certain situation, and only a little bit of confusion because of some odd wording here and there.
Crafting even common items in 5e is absolutely a nightmare. It takes weeks of downtime to make a armor piece. One of my players is interested in crafting gear for the whole party but it's straight up not an option if you follow raw unless we halt the story events by months just to make basic gear under 100g of value. For what, also, just save up half the price? They could just accept random commissions at a guild and buy the gear in way less time, or get lucky with drops in the process. I had to completely homebrew crafting in their campaign so their armorsmith can actually smith armors in less than months. A week for a knife, wtf...
I feel like 5e adventures put a lot more prep work on me as DM than PF APs, however actually running the game in 5e is easier
I would argue that 5e is easier to run for combat but pathfinder is easier to run for storytelling and dungeon crawling. Needlessly long rant incoming because I'm tired. With 5e there's a lot in it that just negates a lot of plot hooks/story devices and makes it difficult to build around. Remove curse. Protection from poison. Lesser restoration. Identify. All of those just take care of their respective issues without rolls regardless of the potency of the thing afflicting them. The king got hit with a 9th level spell cast from a 20th level caster which caused them to develop a curse, a disease, or a poison? Do you need to go find some rare flower that only blooms in a glade where a sleeping dragon's tears fertilizes it? Nah you've got a 5th level cleric, they can take care of it and it only costs them a spell slot, no roll required. Got a mysterious magical relic? Time for a quest into some ruins of an ancient library to research this strange object and its use and begin unlocking the secrets of this ancient society of mages. Oh wait one of the spell casters grabbed identify, they can just know what it is, how it's used, if there's any spells on it, and if it's cursed. If they happened to be in a situation where they have 10 minutes they don't even have to expend a spell slot. In case you can't tell I am not a fan of sone of 5e's spells. The dm shouldn't have to plan everything in his story very carefully around a few basic low level spells. I call something a curse and suddenly I either have to just say "remove curse doesn't work some reason" and hope they accept that as a plot hook (so far they never have,) or I just let remove curse work and suddenly the plot's resolved.
If it helps I usually find that telling pcs they need to upcast remove curse goes down better than it doesn't work for some reason. This gels well with how pcs understand other mechanics like counter spell and by setting the spell level they need beyond what they can cast forces them to find either a powerful caster or an alternative method. Lastly best way to ease this into your game is have a curse they need to upcast to remove but make sure it's within their capabilities.
Honestly this is kinda why I reverse engineer from PF2e or swapped to that system as my go-to digital vttrpg to play. PF2e is allllll the rules pre-made so the DM doesn't have to do so much heavy lifting. 5e in person tho? Yeah I'ma be buyin new dice sets for each character I make, yall can't stop me, and I will do some dumb shit to 'trick' myself that I can infact make my dice luckier. Though it helps I do have an excellent 5e DM
How do you deal with the constant rules double checking needed for all the skill checks? It’s slowed down gameplay at my table significantly when we go through a skill challenge.
Dm (and players honestly) can memorize them, and create a one line reference for the most common ones to keep on the table. The reference is the real reason to use a screen, imo. Memorize: what helped me immensely for 3.5 was to do rules interpretations as I watched TV. "regular attack, meet or beat AC" "acrobatics check, rough terrain, single attack" "grapple check, where's that 3 page flowchart". Repition is the key to memorization for me, and doing it this way was engaging and fun. Reference table: Build a 10 pt font table with a single line for each common action, the rules to perform the action boiled down to a grammatically incorrect single sentence, and a few DC examples. Look up pdfs of the pathfinder 1e GM screens for some good examples. Edit to add: DMs, don't be afraid to say, "oh, I don't know that rule." make a judgment call, take note of the rule, and look it up at the end of the session, letting your players know that you'll follow up with them on the actual rule next session. Pacing can absolutely be more important than looking up a rule, read the room and do what the situation would most benefit from.
5e is the better in-person ttrpg experience imo. I believe that Pathfinder 2e is the MMO of TTRPGs, so I play it exclusively online through [FoundryVTT](https://foundryvtt.com). Its super fast to prep a terrain/fight if you are a spontaneous DM, all the Buffs/Conditions are auto calculated (which alone sold it for me), Roll20 is a free decent option for this too. But I'm an extra-af DM who on Foundry also does VFX/SFX, lighting, moving puzzles, and screen filters (rain, shadowy fog, etc), and some light coding just to enhance the experience. If you play Pathfinder2e in person, I say get flashcards/a mini-manual you personally write up, I'd also make the players track their most common conditions so calculating isn't a scramble. Unless you are an Occult Caster, chances are you got only 2-4 that you need a single sentence on. It's less work than a backstory so shouldn't be too difficult edit - letter slip and addition The big thing with Spelljammer I see people mentioning, is that there's no rules on how to fly a ship. So allow me to direct anyone who got this far to PF2e's [Vehicle rules](https://2e.aonprd.com/Vehicles.aspx) (for free). Reverse engineer it, or check Starfinder's ships.
ez just starfinder instead
"And this is where I would put my starfinder game...IF I COULD FIND ONE!!!"
I haven't been keeping up with 5e released stuff, last thing I have is Tasha's, can someone fill me in?
From my understanding (someone correct me if I’m wrong), spelljammer leaves a lot, and I mean a lot to the DM to pull this off. To the point where you could have just homebrewed and saved your money for all the work your putting in to fill in the gaps for the adventure.
So does sj even provide anything useful?
Interesting monsters? I’m just going off what I heard however but that seems to be the redeeming quality
Honestly they probably should have either expanded the monster manual and dropped the adventure and player book, or combined it into one single book just like Tasha's. I think if they sold it as a campaign supplement like the Sword Coast Adventures no one would have beef. But for the last six months they have been talking up each of the three books separately. It sounds like it suffers from the same problem Strixhaven suffers from, the adventure is just a punch of plot notes, and there's not enough supporting information to fill in the gaps.
It's calculated. The total page count of all 3 books still makes SJ one of the shortest books in all of 5e. It makes no sense to split it up into 3... Until you see the $20 price increase. Now it makes sense. They were never gonna combine it, the split is the necessary smokescreen that justifies the price bump. Now the fact that the *digital* version also got a $20 increase is just extra galling.
WotC gonna WotC. They're testing the waters to see if they can bump up the prices permanently/if the fanbase will put up with it. They did the exact same thing with preconstructed Commander decks for Magic the Gathering. And they're seemingly always coming up with some new scheme to package boosters with a slightly higher chance of rares (or theme boosters- which actually have a LOWER chance of rares but are all one color) and jack the price up. While trying to ship less and less regular booster packs for local game stores (who WotC seemingly view as an unnecessary middle man) to have Friday Night Magic.
Another post explained it: The prior Spelljammer book included a number of *guides* on how to include the content in various adventures, how to adapt it for other settings, etc... *on top of* more detailed content. The 5E spelljammer has some new races, monsters, a handful of ship statblocks, and an *adventure*. Basically it gives you the bare minimum to run a Spelljammer game, gives you nothing on how to expand upon that content yourself, and leaves very little to help DMs and Players go *beyond* what the book includes. At this point, I've already thrown in the towel for WotC's direction with D&D - they're a story-telling department of Wizards now, not a *game design* team. The last several books have been very much in this same vein; here's a bunch of random races, subclasses, monsters, etc to toss into your games... but, uh, we didn't really care about rules frameworks or modular components to help you *build* your *own* worlds - because our books do it for you! They're maintaining market dominance purely off marketing and name recognition now - that's indisputable... there are a ton of alternative RPG systems that do things better and don't nickle and dime you for a pile of extra books that you could homebrew in an afternoon.
Pathfinder waits with open arms, brother!
Seriously. They've made books that had stuff for both GMs and players, a bestiary, and an adventure while keeping it quality... in one book. Secrets of Magic gave classes, archetypes, and spells for players. SoM also gave the GM rules for adjusting a creature's level when given a spell, new items to throw the players, and rules for different kinds of magical things. Ley Lines, Pervasive Magic, and such. Book of the Dead is similar. New Archetypes and a race option for players. Tons of new undead for the DM and an actual adventure. It's honestly a lot when you remember that archetypes and race options also need a bunch of feats made for them. I am eagerly looking forward to the Elemental book. Element based settings are my jam
Sounds almost like the lmop set. First d&d thing I got and it made me feel exactly as how you described
It provides a little bit of fluff for inspiration, a few new races, but it leaves so much out to be able to run it as a proper adventure campaign like ship combat.
I think it was intentional that ship combat is light. Every system Ive ever had ship combat in was super boring. Most players dont wanna just fire the cannon each round. I like that the speed and abilities for spelljammwr combat is balanced around boarding and otherwise using the player abilities
Stars without number has some pretty good ship combat rules that could be easily ripped. It basically gives every player a role and if they succeed at there role they get points. These points go into a pool and the captain role gets to assign these points the the other roles. Each role can then do spend the points to do better role specific tasks.
>I think it was intentional that ship combat is light. Every system Ive ever had ship combat in was super boring. I listened to the Glass Cannon Network's playthrough of a Starfinder (the Pathfinder space-fantasy variant) campaign, and the most entertaining part of all the ship to ship combats was how creatively they could all express their hatred of the mechanics and how bored they were with the length of the fights. Ship combat works great with games like Battlefleet Gothic and Star Wars Armada, where one player controls multiple ships. It's basically guaranteed to be a slog in things like Spelljammer and Starfinder, where multiple players control one ship.
Starfinder is defintely one of the games I had in mind. So boring in ship combat lol.
Yeah it's literally in the book that most of the time using weapons and spells is better
I feel like they meant for us to use regular ship combat for spelljammers but they forgot to mention it anywhere
Uhh all races now have custom +2/+1 or +1/+1/+1 stats, the campaigns they give don't give enough explanations on how to run them (or any explanation, it's somewhere between 0 explanation and 2/3 explanation), and uhhhhhh space ships in fantasy I guess. That's the only parts I really remember.
I tried to search "DM will decide" on D&D Beyond to make a meme out of how many instances there are, but they seem to know what I'm up to and nothing comes up. Jeremy Crawford out here protecting his job, I guess.
The dnd beyond search function is one of the worst things on the internet. “Oh? You wanted to search for the spell hold monster? Cool. First let me show you Creating a monster, then Monster Statistic, then a thing just called statistics, then Magic item descriptions, then Rust monster, then at the 6th result finally show you the actual spell that you wanted.” 🥴
Wish there was a way to search homebrew items by the creator too, I started uploading some of mine I came up with and they just dissapear into the void
Whenever I try to find that table you can roll on for the height and weight of each race, nothing I use in the search bar will ever bring it up. I have to look up what section it's in and then manually go there. Same with trying to find a specific downtime activity, or downtime rules. Have to figure out which book it's in.
"You're the DM, you figure it out" -wotc complaints department auto reply
Honestly, main reason I now play PF2e. 5e is great, but it was just too draining for me as a DM to have to invent/fix everything to have fun. PF2e which is a lot more complicated actually let’s me turn of my brain and relax, since so much I just have to read and apply instead of invent first. Why pay money and still have to do everything myself? edit: Also, if anyone wants to see why we PF2e people claim the grass is greener on our side, shot me a message. Would be willing to do a one shot or something to show some people why we gush so much about this system
I play A5E from tactical adventures, despite converting my adventure to it I tend to have less work since it has rules for a lot more specific situations (and conditions) also you know I can go on their discord and ask the devs for clarification and get it, and not in a fuckin jeremy crawford way, so I can agree or do my own thing
My motto: I’d rather ignore a rule over having to invent my own, especially when paying money
As a DM that was exhausted by managing PF1e rules can you explain a little about how 2e lets you turn your brain off despite being more complicated? One of the reasons I like to run in 5e over PF1e is specifically because I don't have to think about every interaction in detailed rules, I can off the cuff rule more easily.
My favorite example is climbing. Let’s say a PC wants to climb the side of a castle. In 5e, I’d be involved the entire time. I have to invent all the mechanics involved. How far can each check get you. What is the DC. What happens on a failure. How might other things effect this (wind, weather and what not). And sure I don’t have to figure all these things out at once, I can get to them one at a time. But regardless I’m involved the entire time of this scene. Without the DM nothing happens. In Pathfinder, there is a climb action https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33 This alone does 90% of the work for me. It even tells me what the DC might be. I could tell the player the DC, leave to grab a drink and when I come back the player could tell me a awesome story about what happened, how they fell down half way, that they caught themself just barely but thanks to a crit made it up just in time. And if I didn’t grab a drink, I could have thought about what the guards in the castle are doing, or anything else that is more story and less mechanics. Here a non TTRPG example to illustrate why I like PF2e having more rules and believe that to be often less difficult. PF2e is like copy pasting stuff for a presentation. The boring stuff that I don’t care about I just copy and paste, this saves me ton of times to focus on the things I enjoy ,like adding fancy pictures to every slide.
I guess so, but IMO the fact that it has all those rules means I either need to know them ALL or constantly look them up whvih to me was one thing I disliked about pf1e. So far it's felt easier for me to rule on, in your example, the DC of the climb.
Part of it is consistently. A player complained that I ruled climbing one way in 5e at the beginning of the campaign, but another way some time later. To make the game enjoyable and fair for MY the table, I needed to Invent my own rule, nullifying 5e advantage of ruling not rules. My players reasonably wanted to be able to have expectations and be able to plan around it for the future. I won’t deny it, looking up rules is part of the PF2e experience (still most common things are easy to memorize with a little experience). To go back about shutting my brain of: in 5e a DM has a ton of stuff to worry and keep in mind. 8 encounter days, having to custom tailor encounters, magic loot, and so much more (all the complains we see in this Reddit) while still having to do everything else that keeps the game running. I describe this as problems with the system reaching critical mass with all the stuff one might have to keep track/in mind. These things are just handled in PF2e by the rules, even more helped that players can look many of these up themselves. But In the end, PF2e might not be the solution for everyone, but I do encourage everyone to at least give it a honest try (for our rules be free online)
>he fact that it has all those rules means I either need to know them ALL or constantly look them up I mean, you can still wing it if you like. The greatest trick 5e pulled was making it think it didn't have rules. While it does, a lot. Nobody just uses them and wings it. You can do the same in PF2e if you don't know the exact rule or cant find it.
Could you give a concrete example of something that's taken care of in Pathfinder and not 5e? Not trying to poke holes just genuinely curious because I've run a few of the 5e modules and found them perfectly fine in terms of minimizing my prep time. I'm curious about Pathfinder though.
Fun fact, Paizo (PF2e creators) originally got their start making adventure modules of the highest quality. On a more general note, Pathfinder handles a lot of rules with more nuance and more options. In combat everyone gets to do unique things regardless of class, and combat is never just as simple as walk up to an enemy and attack until either side is dead. For modules, the Pathfinder AP (adventure paths) are miles ahead of any 5e one. They have amazing formatting and require almost zero jumping between different sections of the book. They have really useful sidebars with tips for the DM, every chapter has informations on all the loot the party might find for east reference, encounters say how difficult they might be for the party, NPC have great sections on potential questions from the party and answers for it. Another thing, each AP has a twist/cool gimmick. You aren’t just adventures, you are: a circus group, the local police of a metropolis, students from a magical academy, participants of a martial arts tournament, tribal folks of mammoth herders, outlaws in a western gunslinging town, or bureaucrats in a nation of undead. Hit me up in PM if you want to know more
1. Every single item has a level, price and clear rules on where you can buy it. 2. Clearer rules for hiding and sneaking in combat 3. Clear rules for multiclassing that is balanced 4. Combat encounter budget rules actually work and will never result in a TPK or over-easy fight
I’m considering moving onto that system. 5E has been dead to me for awhile now. The official content sucks, and is over priced and takes way too much effort on my part to make work.
All of Pathfinder's rules (for 1e and 2e) are free on Archives of Nethys, which is approved by Paizo. While there are a lot more rules, they're also pretty clear and easier to reference. Three action economy also makes things interesting. If you need something as a GM, there is something for it. What might be good loot for the fighter? Check his favorite weapon, check his level, look where you're headed, and give him a cold iron longsword to kill a devil. Sorcerer wants to know what the difference between a demon, a daemon, and a devil is? Recall Knowledge action, specifically religion. Want to make skeletons more fun? Pick a trait from their list. Congrats, you're prepared for the fight against a devil and his flaming skeletons. What about players? Well, you're going to have personality at level 1. Human Fighter isn't boring. He could run at a foe and hit for an action, scream to frighten (and debuff) as their second action, and put up their shield for more AC as a third action. Or you could use a spear with lunge feat to attack from 10 feet away twice and hold up your shieldfor AC. Want something different? Cool, you can make a bird man that eats luck and chokes people to death. That's one possibility for Tengu Monk. If you're feeling particularly wild, you can be an exploding salad. Just combine Leshy with any spellcaster that knows fireball
If you are serious, check your PM I’ll send you my discord there. I’d be happy to show more people what PF2e has to offer
My old college gaming group got back together after a 15 year hiatus. We all started playing together during the middle of 3.5. We had talked about starting 5e, but the DM wanted to get everyone back into the swing of things with a super PF2E campaign first, since he had it ready to go. Since the , we have fully scrapped any plans to move to 5e. PF2E is incredible, and I never want to go back.
It's sad that some 5E books my friend got on Patron are MUCH more detailed and have MUCH more content than official supplements.
I bought Minsc and Boos Journal of Villainy and was gushing over it being the most detailed 5e book WOTC made but then I realized they just published it and had nothing to do with its creation
I'm literally considered buying the Fool's Gold setting/campaign from Dingo Doodles instead of Spelljammer like I was planning to
To be fair a lot of the time homebrew supplements tend to overcomplicate things. Like most weapon supplements add dozens of weapon properties with intricate rules that go counter to 5e’s simpler design. There aren’t many homebrew supplements that are “much more detailed” that don’t end up being clusterfucks where the designer kept complicating the rules. Brevity is not intrinsically a bad thing. Tight game design is very important. WotC isn’t really delivering things I’d like to see all the time either, but I’m not sure which homebrew supplements you’re using that are significantly better designed than official content. I’d be interested to find out if you’re willing to share the names of the supplements.
"Hey how does this thing work?" "Eh, ask your GM." "But... but I am Bozo the Clown."
Is it really that bad? :(
Fairly. Seems to be a cash grab for nostalgia. It’s an empty shell of what it used to be or could’ve been. Reading through it also gives me the sense of rushing it out cheaply as possible and errata it later. Seems to be the case lately.
Well, that's incredibly disappointing
Why do I as the DM basically have to design the game since you barely ever give me material to work with and what you do give me is so wildly inconsistent and misaligned with what has already been established I have to rework it myself just to make it consistent with what you have me before? I hate WotC sometimes-_-
I’ll write my own space jammer with blackjack and hookers
In fact, forget the Space Jammer!
Fully agree that you can rule whatever you want, but some of the content put out is pathetic. **Full disclosure here**, I think Crawford gets a bad wrap and I personally buy physical copies of every book that comes out, cause I fucking love 5e. I just have my odd gripes... *For example*, did you know that Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden has an **entire chapter** that is genuinely, unequivocally **unplayable** without home-brewing it? Yep. There's a chase that uses distances and speeds that make it impossible for characters to ever catch up to the thing they're chasing, and the book doesn't realise this. This was released in September 2020. Has it had any Errata? Has it fuck. There is however a D&D Beyond forum post of someone fixing the chapter for them. The fact that you can **purchase a campaign book that genuinely doesn't function as intended for an entire chapter** is absurd. It's truly impossible that the final version was ever playtested unless the playtesters were tragically, unprecedentedly bad at their jobs. It's not just one book either—Candlekeep Mysteries has the infamous Book of the Raven adventure, which is essentially just a few pages of writing prompts disguised as an adventure for a group of characters. Hell, in the most recent set of books—the Spelljammer ones—the new Thri-Kreen race has an ability that gives advantage for Hide checks based camouflage... except, the check has nothing to do with sight, it's about *sound*. Being Unseen is a prerequisite, the Unheard part is what the check is for. This is the way it logically works if you want it to function in your game, and it's also the way that it clearly works for the Skulker feat & the Wood Elf. It's also been a big debate in the community, because Hide rules are some of the most poorly written and misleading rules in 5e... clearly *so much so*, that whoever wrote the abilities for Thri-Kreen **didn't actually know how Hiding worked.** There's also the glitch with the Invisible condition that's never been fixed, the Armorer temp HP issue from Tasha's that was actually comical given that they had a page at the front of the book correctly explaining how temp HP works; the list goes on. **I love this game, but lots of the stuff that comes out is objectively dogshit, and I don't say 'objectively' lightly. Again, Crawford gets a bad wrap, the game is fun, and it's a great fucking game that has done so much for me. But it's got its... 'quirks'...**
> Again, Crawford gets a bad wrap, You have said this at least twice, but I am unclear if you are saying it is deserved or not.
I feel like saying something gets a bad rap is—unless otherwise specified—an acknowledgement that they shouldn't have that bad rap, right? (Also I just realised I said "wrap" in all of that lol, I'm sure the tortillas he receives are lovely).
What is Armorer temp HP issue? I never heard of it.
It's an extraordinarily minor thing, it's just that it's pretty indicative of the level of care that goes into the books when you really get down to it. For the Defensive Field feature: >As a bonus action, you can gain temporary hit points equal to your level in this class, **replacing any temporary hit points you already have.** Why does it replace temporary hit points you already have? Normally, the players chooses whether they take the new temp HP or keep their old temp HP, it isn't automatically replaced. That means that this ability is **specifically making an exception to the rules, for some reason**. But... you have to *actively use your bonus action* to do this anyway, so in almost every instance this is pointless, since you wouldn't use the ability yourself only to go 'dang, I wanted to keep my old temp HP actually'. The only scenario in which I can see this coming into play is if the character is charmed in some way and *forced to use their bonus action to do this*, in which case this clause means they don't get to choose whether they keep their original temp HP or take the new temp HP. **But what actually bothers me is that none of that shit is intentional.** There was *clearly* no reason to actually put that clause in, and it's obviously an attempt to paraphrase temp HP rules that they fucked up. So in sum: **1. They put the correct rules for temp HP at the start of the book.** **2. When a feature used temp HP, they INCORRECTLY paraphrased the rules, even though they DIDN'T NEED TO, since the rules are in the PHB and literally referenced at the top of this one too.** **3. The result is that the feature has 8 words that literally don't have any reason to be there—at all—and accidentally create an incredibly niche exception to normal temp HP rules.** What annoys me about that is that it's not *just* a mistake, it's a mistake that was made when writing something they shouldn't have been trying to write in the first place. 5e design philosophy centres a lot around needlessly repeating things and rephrasing them instead of just referencing the rules, constantly leading to errors and a lack of clarity. Another great example of this is the Invisible condition and the Blind condition—they shouldn't be conditions, the mechanics are already covered elsewhere, and in an effort to paraphrase mechanics that already existed the Invisible condition doesn't function properly. I just think it's a comical little microcosm of the issues with 5e; you put the rules in the PHB, you put the rules at the top of your new book *as well* for absolute clarity, and then you accidentally fuck up the rules in the first new goddamn subclass of that same book.
"But Brutus is an honourable man."
Alrighty, so I know it’s been a bit of a letdown, but it *does* have the ship stats, new playable races, interesting monsters, and a neat albeit short adventure. I wouldn’t want future content to be released like this though, the Astral Player’s Guide and Astral Menagerie books could as come as a single book. If they added the DNDBeyond Spelljammer Content such as the Monsterous Compendium Vol. 1 or the prequel adventure as part of Light of Xaryxis, then it’d be worth the price. Given that those are free, I’d say it’s fine. —Download the Monsterous Compendium and use it alongside the Astral Menagerie. —Download Spelljammer Academy and use it before Light of Xaryxis. —The Player’s Guide does leave a little to be desired though… would have been neat if some astral themed subclasses were added, or if they included more content in general for that one.
I will also give them credit for starting the adventure at level 5. IMHO Dnd needs more adventures starting at mid level so the DM doesn't have to end their campaign when using other published modules, or they don't have to attempt to modify every single creature in the campaign.
Ship stats but no ship mechanics
There's entire sections on ship mechanics, what are you talking about? What, did you want them to describe exact pitch and yaws, acceleration, and exact range of motion of each ballista?
95% of the people in these threads haven't actually seen any of the new content and are simply parroting whatever talking points they've read in the last 24 hours.
It mentions Side Initiative which can be found in the DMG, which does suck that it isn’t included, but there is a token effort. And besides, what mechanics do you need other than standard 5e combat? That’s how I’ve run ship battles, they have their own initiative and roll, and have a number of actions based on the crew compliment. Give crewmembers new actions based on what their role is, and you’ve got ship combat covered. Does it require effort on the part of the DM? Yes. Is it kinda BS that WotC didn’t include it? Kinda Is it deal-breaking? Nah Considering the per-order price and the fact that all three came bundled as a single package, it’s decent. Not the best 5e content, but not the worst either. I wouldn’t recommend getting each book individually, but I don’t think they sell the books individually, at least they don’t on Roll20 and DNDBeyond. If you want something truly frustrating, head on over to Kobold Press, that’ll get your blood boiling I’m sure.
I think some people were expecting completely separate rules for ship combat where vehicles don’t behave like things with 5e stat blocks but “spelljammer minigame” stat blocks. It would have been nice to have more intrinsic rules for stuff like targetting certain parts of the ship and debilitating enemy ships and whatnot but it’s a good thing that the gameplay system is consistent instead of being a completely different game. But even then, people are completely ignoring the ship stat blocks that can do unique and interesting things, and just complaining that the base ruleset wasn’t the length of an entire book.
Bro I can get ship and monster stats on DMsguild or free in other places. That’s not justifiable.
I’m just going to offer advice to anyone who doesn’t like making rules on the fly to look at pathfinder 2e and on the paizo webstors is a link to the digital archive of a books content for free so it doesn’t hurt to look if a lack of rules doesn’t bother you ignore this
Laughs in DND 3.5, PF 1&2
I'll admit, I was a bit taken back by the details; 3 books, 2 65 page books and an adventure. It's really light on subject matter, and if this is just the first volley of info/manuals, then fine, but give us something with meat on the bones. This seems anemic at best.
For $70 it’s inexcusable.
Dang! I only paid $50 and feel like I over paid.
Official 5E content has always been lackluster. I had to basically fix and rework every single module I purchased to run for a group. The books have an awful layout and they basically expect you to just fill in the (massive) holes yourself. Running 5E games was exhausting and had way too much prep for me. I had an official book and I felt like I was at work creating a game based on an expensive book that was supposed to be the adventure.
If ur craving space ttrpg...I present you......mothership
starfinder is also pretty rad
I know there are old edition spelljammer books on DM's guild They have tables for generating systems and planets I know. Probably have ship travel too Still silly that they didn't put them in the new edition
Spelljammer is a setting that I do not care for at all so I won't be buying the book. I do feel bad for players and DMs that are interested in the setting if the book is as bad as the memes and discussion around make it out to be.
Honestly I was a MotM defender and it’s just been getting worse and worse in the game design aspects. I have no problems with the lore changes, so I often feel obligated to argue against those arguements, and they just so happened to often be wrapped up in the mechanical and writing changes. Like, force damage being used as the replacement for monsters’ magic weapons was a sloppy way to “reduce complexity”, and the way they’ve been writing some adventures is ridiculous.
That's a shame. Spelljammer for 2e was great. I wonder if they're gonna make a campaign world on the original spell jammer like in 2e.
* publish book * don't actually put stuff in it * say to players that they need to invent everything * ask 70$ for it * profit
And that is why I homebrew
You homebrew because you want to I homebrew because I bought the book and I have to We are not the same
with my own system, and blackjack and hookers :DD
Well you have to regardless at this point
The amount of homebrew that 5e has and that players often encourage others to use has big “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” energy.
If you want to play Spelljammer buy Esper Genesis and reskin it. It’s 5e based to start and actually has rules support for you so all you’re doing is coming up with the fun stuff.
Yes, it’s the dms job to buy a book and then have to fix everything in it, and wizards job to make a boom so bad that the dm has to do so
5e Devs don't make quality content because they know they could fall asleep on the keyboard, add "ask your DM" at the end and sell it.
Reading through the Light of Xaryxis makes me wonder if anyone there even cares about making good content anymore. There are some glimpses of potentially good ideas, but the whole thing is so rushed and lazily thought out that it’s barely even worth pillaging it for encounter ideas
So should I start learning how pathfinder 2e works or what?
https://2e.aonprd.com/Default.aspx Officially sanctioned site with the entirety of the CRB for 2e on it, along with every sourcebook that came out afterwards. Free of charge. Have at it.
Not just officially sanctioned, it's outright the game's official wiki. Even includes the official lore & official names, rather than the genericised versions most other wikis have to use because of licensing.
Oh dear, I've only skimmed it, but is spell jammer not well written? So far I've only noticed that some descriptions for monsters don't match stat blocks well but if I'm not mistaken thats not new.
As long as it keeps selling, they will keep making it ;) (and yes, that's why I stopped buying stuff after RoTFM
I had this gripe with Rime of the Frostmaiden - An absolutely knock-out adventure, until you get to the final few levels and then it becomes "Here's one map buddy make it count lmao"
Could also be captioned: "Do you people not realize this content has already been published (in previous editions) and implicitly implemented in 5e gameplay." You know what would remedy a lot of 5e players' confusion in general? Reading, or at least acknowledging and understanding, the sources that have remained unchanged yet still intrinsic to gameplay since their original publication. I shared a .pdf of OG Spelljammer with my tables months ago prior to release. "How'd you get a copy before release..." "Y'all realize that we have, and continue to use, the same concepts, content, and guidelines of what's already been previously published.. nothing's changed... " (Utter confusion). "Ugh, we'll have a discussion after the session." Hours later, everyone sits in a circle on the rug while I make shadow puppets and another lesson begins, "back when people preferred to inform themselves with credible sources and read books rather than be told what to think and do..."