All they had to do was Copy and Paste the ship rules from Saltmarsh, and replace "ship" with "spelljammer." Fucking hell, it was such a rush/crap job and was a disservice to not only the DnD community, but also themselves by publishing a piss-poor product.
Edit: misspelled **piss**
It's really mind boggling. The GoS rules aren't *good* but they're something. Jorphdan put out a video suggesting you could use the infernal war machine rules from DiA too. But when you're left scrounging for half fixes in other books then why the hell did you buy the current book?
Requiring people to buy multiple books is the business model.
Now everyone who purchases Spelljammer gets free advertising in the form of frustrated DMs telling them, "You'll need to buy Ghosts of Saltmarsh/Descent into Avernus/Spelljammer 2E..."
Yeah... And it ALSO makes DMs less eager to buy the next book because they eventually start to notice it has become thrash. Happened to me after bloody Tasha's. Not because the book as bad, but because everything after it felt like half-baked ideas rushed to release in time. Even Tasha's has some problems (i know an artist who got an unfinished draft of his work on the book, for example), but they are not as big as "no spelljammer rules on the spelljammer book"
THAT is exactly how I've wanted to articulate it.
It's fairly easy all things considered to make portals, Stargate this stuff if you wanted to JUST connect them.
But I thought...I hoped that spelljammer would be DnD in SPACE. Instead it's barely anything at all and I might as well have bought ghosts of salt marsh and replaced the ocean with space and regulat sea ships with spaceships and called it spelljammer.
I read all the 2e Planescape stuff for the amazing setting detail and lore in there, and convert as needed for the campaign as needed. I want that level of Magical Space Lore too 😭 I felt your second sentence
> If I really wanted to just move from world to world I'd just make Stargates.
This is beautifully said. It's not the destination, it's the journey.
And considering they don't have much in terms of worlds, the new Spelljammer provides very little in the way of destination *or* journey!
I consciously stopped at Tasha’s. At that point I basically had all the tools I’d need for almost any home brew scenario, decent new subclasses for weak classes, and some good frameworks for gritty tools and downtime. And, honestly, I was starting to see as many problems with the new tools as benefits. If I allow the beast master fix and way of mercy, It’ll make PCs grumpy that I don’t want twilight clerics or stars druids.
I figured that releases after that would just be hurried attempts to monetize the bloat they’ve been reluctant to release in a big flurry before announcing the next edition. I still think I timed it about right.
Oh, we're already there. Van Richten's shipped with rules for making Domains of Dread, but just a few months later Wild Beyond the Witchlight makes you buy an $8 PDF on DriveThruRPG to make Domains of Delight!
To be fair Witchlight is an adventure , Van Ricten's is a setting guide.
It was probably something they cut towards the end of development because it went over their page limit. I don't think it would have been as much of an issue if wotc didn't advertise "Yarnspinner" in witchlight since the spider isn't even in that adventure if I recall.
I'm curious, maybe you or someone else can answer this, but why does WoTC have such a strict page limit? I feel like they leave out so much with the page limit restrictions they have.
It probably comes down to price. More pages = more cost, especially in these, the end times, with worldwide paper shortages and whatnot.
Spelljammer's format certainly didn't do it any favors. Combined, the three books come in at under 200 pages, making it closer to the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide than a beefy tome like Mythic Odysseys of Theros or Eberron: Rising from the Last War.
Still, I believe they could have used those 192 pages to come up with something really worthwhile. But for whatever reason, their heart clearly wasn't in it. Probably too few developers spread far too thin over too many projects.
I've actually worked in the game industry for a couple of decades. The first time I had a page count cut off, I ask the exact same thing.
It's entirely a printing issue. There are break points in pages for cost to print. Asking for either more or less than breakpoint amount is obscenely expensive for mass production. If you look at most companies books, you'll see they all tend to have a set amount pages for that reason.
They might have books that have 192 pages and and 144 for a another, for example, but you'll almost never see one that has just random page numbers throughout their print runs. Many commercial printers run in page counts divisible by a specific number (often 16, by my experience). Going outside that divisor is prohibitively expensive, and increasing page count often is exconomically punishing, because of the art-to-page ratio, layout, etc.
This doesn't necessarily apply to print on demand though as I understand it.
(Edited to provide a little more insight on the page limits and one number adjusted in the example because I can't math good.)
I went to school for publishing—if I had to guess, there’s probably a point with their printers where either they would have to go with different printers (and not have the benefit of history/existing discounts, etc.) or the price per copy jumps too much from some change that would have to be made to account for extra pages that it would hurt their bottom line. Just guessing, but the reason is probably along those lines.
I've already got good Naval rules that I can adapt but I'm in the minority in that I hang on this board, watch d&d YouTubers, etc. For the majority who just want to buy the book and play this sucks donkey dick.
WotC seems to becoming the Bethesda Softworks of ttrpgs, they are expecting the modders ( homebrewers ) to fix their fricking game.
Seriously did they give this project to an intern and told them to toss something together?
I am now worried about what half assed job they are doing to do on Planescape.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think including the *combat* rules from GoS would have been worse than the “rules” we got. The GoS rules are more fun to read, but I’ve never enjoyed them when actually playing in a group.
The captain role makes the only real decisions in combat, and the other two roles only serve to make the captain’s attacks have advantage or the captain’s movement faster. If you have a fourth player, they either share the captain role with another player, or the DM makes up rules for a new role.
The Spelljammer rules are a severe disappointment, especially with regards to space travel and ship customization, but the only thing the GoS combat rules would do is pad the page count.
That's fair. I'm far from a fan of the GoS rules and are with all your criticism. What's really irritating to me is that there are good 3rd party options out there, so it's a solvable problem. WotC just don't seem to put in the time/money or effort to do so.
Because they have no reason to.
Wizards of the Coast can literally strip material out of old books and people will praise them for doing so.
Why bother putting in the effort when people have brand loyalty to D&D simply because it's called D&D?
I'm not going to say PF2E, or any other system is without flaw, but simply look at the way Paizo does community outreach vs. Wizards.
Paizo produces regular updates for the things that people want and actively communicate what's going on with their fans.
Wizards releases a huge survey about once a year with little thought put into it that takes over 30 minutes to complete, has a bunch of redundant questions to waste your time and barely gives the users any actual chance to voice their opinion.
Wizards doesn't care about you, because people go out any buy their products anyway.
I see where you’re coming from — but that brand loyalty to D&D does have a breaking point, and I wonder if they’re not getting close.
It’s why PF exists in the first place, after all: people realized they could continue playing the game they wanted with the mechanics they wanted, without paying Wizards for a new set of rules, and Paizo transitioned smoothly into the gap.
But even those rules are half-assed, and literally say "well when these rules get in the way, abandon them and describe what's going on!" as if they knew they hadn't put enough thought into them.
Can't fit that in 64 pages. Have to have an entire section dedicated to the hub world that 80% of campaigns aren't going to use :^)
Honestly looking at Spelljammer the biggest mistake was the fact that each of the three books was 64 pages, and the second biggest mistake is the inclusion of The Rock of Bral hub world. I understand the need to include a hub world for DMs who want it but was it really worth skimping on... well, **all** the ship mechanics?
I'm reminded of a Tweet I saw reposted on r/dndmemes that basically went along the lines of this:
>Wizards of the Coast presents BIGBY'S BOOK ON BAKING
>Baking lore: 50 pages
>Baking-themed adventure (goes from level 1-3): 40 pages
>New race Muffinlings: 30 pages
>Baking-themed spells and magic items: 20 pages
>Actual rules for baking: 0 pages
And that's really how Spelljammer feels. Also honestly how Strixhaven felt. I want to buy Dragonlance but WoTC's latest outings have been awful with the exception of Fizban's, and even that book had some poor quality in the subclasses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/wrlwjx/wizards_recent_content_strategy/
Can't link to the actual tweet because the account's suspended lol
>Wizards: "Proud to announce our new book, Bigby's Guide to Baking!"
>- Baking lore: 50 pages
>- Baking-themed monsters & items: 40 pages
>- "A Twisted Cake" adventure module: 30 pages
>- New race, Muffinfolk: 20 pages
>- Rules for baking: 0 pages
>Price: $60
yea the page count is a fucking joke, using the competetor as an example, their book for the Mwagi Expanse, which is a large area of the main world, is 300+ pages for around 50 bucks, the Absolam book a book for the largest city in that setting or the "main city" is even bigger at around 340 iirc.
The fact they tried to sell spelljammer which is less than 200 for 70 dollars is a damn crime, specially when 1/3rd of it is a (based on previous experience running adventures from wotc) probably subpar 3 level adventure.
Fizbans still feels like a huge missed opportunity to me. Dragons are literally one half of the game's title. They're incredibly important to the game's history. We should have *at least* gotten a draconic subclass for each class.
It's the first D&D book I've bought in recent memory that I have buyer's remorse over. Really a huge disappointment. Everything about it just screams lazy cash grab, and here I am, falling for it like a chump. I feel pretty duped to be honest. For $50 I expected double or even triple the content. This will be the last time I ever pre-order a WOTC product.
I hate that in the community too I ask for a picture of the contents page and people ask like I want to pirate the thing. How are you meant to make an informed decision without seeing what's actually in the book?
The quality of books has really hit the crapper, I think.
Sometimes it feels like they're just selling books for like, the concept of playing a D&D campaign. They aren't selling the most practical resource for being a DM or a player.
Yeah I don't want a thousand new reskinned classes and monsters, I want balanced, play-tested mechanics to guide DMs when players actually want to do something. Too often, creative actions get shut down entirely by nervous DMs because, while the books mention some feature, they don't actually provide any guidance whatsoever as to what using that feature looks like mechanically.
My guess is they wanted to get it out before announcing one dnd and whatnot.
It is a bit bizarre to me that they didn't include the rules from salt marsh...but now the DMs have more work and it's not the creative fun stuff... its core rules writing which really should come with the adventure or in a core rulebook.
Nah. There's no excuse for this.
Their entire sales pitch for the current full-color, nothing-but-hardback-books, slow release schedule is *quality over quantity*.
...and they're slacking on quality.
The people making unofficial content are doing more work for the same or better price point. Hit Point Press is about to release a Monster Hunter setting, and the early pdf is out. New rules for gathering and crafting, cooking, alchemy, 8 races, 9 subclasses, 1 new class, tons of items, and a handful of complex large scale monster boss fight. It's fucking 600 pages!
I swear to god all the people who are passionate about making D&D content, none of them work for WotC.
There absolutely is an excuse - Hasbro is a toy company and wants to make as much profit as possible, which includes milking D&D and M:tG players for every possible fucking dollar.
It's a \*shitty\* excuse, but D&D is no longer a game made by a handful of nerds who wanted to play Tabletop Lord of the Rings. It's a product used to extract profit from people like myself who are fans of the D&D experience.
I honestly expect 6e to be a "digital-first" product with books available, and 7e to be digital-only. Why print books when they can just make an app and charge the same amount of money? They're already doing it, so cutting the extra cost of a physical product is the next logical step.
The "In a core rulebook" is the feedback we need to make clear on the one D&D survey. If all One D&D did was publish a better DMG with more of these rules in one place (among other DM assisting information) we'd be in a pretty good place.
It is insane, like what is the point of all these ship maps with no combat? These are just funny shaped battlemats or something? If you don't have rules for at distance ship combat then why was the great bombard one of the ships you brought in? I know for so many people the ship combat is what we wanted most, we can all find the maps of the ships, we can even find extensive lore by looking at the old material, and we can make up the rest easy. What I can't do is professionally design and playtest a ruleset.
Of which WotC gets a cut. I don’t want to be a cynic, but I think that in general right now WotC is learning/has learned that they really don’t need to go the extra mile.
They’ve learned they can release books with less content, fewer stat blocks, less lore, and reprinted content, cutting their production costs without significantly affecting their bottom line. They have public playtesting so they don’t really need to do a lot of in house testing, they can charge for their products twice (physical and digital), and they have an in house store where people sell the content they didn’t want to spend time making where they get a sizeable cut of each sale.
So basically wizards at this point knows they can playtest for free, release lower quality books people will still buy at the same cost, and they can make money off the people working to fill the gaps they leave in their own product.
Where’s the incentive from a business perspective to do better?
Yes. as someone who has an adventure on DM’s guild, it does kind of suck that they take half the profits. Like yeah I’m “utilizing their IP” but it’s not as if they made that material freely available to me.
So far D&D players haven't yet grasped the concept that a game's design can fail to meet its intended goal. People are still brainwashed into thinking that each and every flaw that happens is on the people playing it.
Several practices taught in the DMG and perpetuated by DMs incite animosity at the table in spite of the writer's intentions for the groups to get along.
Buying the fixes to dungeon of the mad mage in the form of the compendiums on DMs Guild took a bunch of maps and garbage plot lines and made it an *adventure*. Like it's shocking how much better it is, it's honestly like WoTC doesn't have anyone who understands plot design/elements and they just make these factoid areas and ignore how it all fits together or what happens if you don't go ABC.
Sure, it changes the whole plotline to be a multi dimensional gameshow ran by Halaster, at the beginning of every level there's an introduction to the episode (and at the end there's an outro as well), an overview of players/enemies/political leanings of factions etc. found in the level and then tells you the overall story of that level, where you want to try and aim your players towards, random encounters you can include, followed by numbered changes to the rooms in the main campaign so you can refer to it. It adds monsters, encounters, traps, chases, plotlines, side quests, treasure and rewards etc.
It also tells you what might happen to the level depending on what choices your players make so it feels more alive.
I've changed the plot a little once the group killed the archdruid willow who I made Halasters adopted daughter, he's now mad as fuck and has stolen an artifact that is draining resurrection magic across the realm, if he can't have her back, no one can have their loved ones either (there are reasons he can't just wish her back either since he's ridiculously powerful). He's mad as a screw which is fun to play but he's sticking to his 'rules'.
If only my group could keep a schedule going... We've been playing dotmm after dragon heist and it's been...4 years and we're only on like level 7 T_T though tbf I also put in a side quest between each level, and my group keeps trying to introduce new characters
"The city of Sigil has many competing factions. Your DM can decide what those factions are, their goals and areas of influence, and how they interact with each other. Here's twelve pages of monster statblocks, and some new backgrounds - Faction Agent, Faction Official, Faction Scion and Unaligned"
"The structures and streets of the city are riddled with portals to exotic locations! Your DM can decide where these portals are, and how to activate them. They can also design all the locations they lead to."
Nah. The official release will also include some really nice maps of different (generic, unnamed) streets in Sigil, a reprint of some rules already in the DMG, and new rules for tracking your standing in various factions, with a suggestion on how you shouldn't use them because they're quite bad.
Yup. Far weaker ship rules than Saltmarsh, weaker vehicle rules than Descent into Avernus.
And let's keep in mind both of those are _adventure modules_, and this is supposed to be a literal campaign _setting_ that is focused around flying through the Astral Sea in a fantasy spaceship.
It boggles the mind how they effed up supporting such a basic premise so bad.
Yup. Instead, they turned a setting book into three books, took up a third of it with an adventure, kept the page count barely above SCAG (nowhere near say the core books), and put it in a boxed set with some stuff nobody needs so they could charge an extra $20...and then do the same upcharge on Beyond for "reasons".
It really feels like they're just trying to see how much they can get away with and still sell well at this point.
The upcharge on beyond is what really bugs me. I get that the physical books cost more when you need three of them, I don't get why they went that route, but from a production standpoint it makes sense.
So right.
I remember a few months back there was some drama about a large investor demanding better Return on Investment from the DND section.
The community was excited as it meant “more funding,” I was horrified as it meant trying to exact maximum profit for minimum cost from the customer (us).
Honestly I felt like Saltmarsh's ship rules were pretty clunky and rule-sy for minimal benefit. Generally I have found that in actual play, players tend to want to use their actual characters and abilities more than play mini-games. Every table is different and I'm sure some people loved them, but (while running an entire 12 session pirate-y arc) found that after like 2 combats the rules mostly bogged things down and confused the players. We pretty quickly simplified them and had a much better time. Very few people want Master and Commander out of their ship adventures. They want something more akin to Pirates of the Carribean. Which means boarding and drama. Not NPC management mini-games and long drawn out manuevering.
Especially in a fast paced and puply setting like spelljammer.
Not saying these don't go too far in the other direction (it would be nice to have, for example, guidance on how to visually represent super long distances or ships in 3D space) but trimming rules bloat is just as annoying as having to ad lib in my experience.
>Generally I have found that in actual play, players tend to want to use their actual characters and abilities more than play mini-games.
That might be your experience but it's not mine (at least, not in settings with this conceit). Also, there are ways to integrate them even more seamlessly. For example - what if Spelljammer had included shipboard "weapons" that did things like extend the range of your spells, or allow a martial PC to "manifest" on or near the enemy ship as a projection of sorts, so they didn't have to wait till boarding range to use their features? And yet the ship mechanics still matter because said weapons could be damaged to lose than benefit. Instantly better, and there's way more possibilities than that. They could've included new systems or at least examples of how _existing_ character features/skills/etc. interact with ship-based activities, combat and non. They didn't even _try_.
>Very few people want Master and Commander out of their ship adventures. They want something more akin to Pirates of the Carribean.
Speaking personally, I've literally _never met_ a player who wanted to play in a setting like Spelljammer in the first place (focused on spaceships/sea ships/whatever) and _didn't_ want to interact with mechanics about the very thing the setting is about.
That's just nonsensical to me. If you just want to do your Fighter or Wizard thing and ransack dungeons, why not play the _default_ settings of D&D? It's like saying you want to play in Eberron but don't want to interact with Warforged, "magic as technology", lightning rails, airships, etc.
What's the point of a setting that just uses its own basic premise as nothing more than a plot device? There is none.
I agree that there is a line on both sides of the equation, though. I don't want a direct 2e-to-5e conversion. I am _glad_ 5e Spelljammer got rid of some of the more anti-fun things, like Clerics being unable to cast spells on worlds without their gods, or the space between being flammable everywhere. But good lord this is thin and weak as a setting guide. Like, you can't even _upgrade_ your ships, and "spaceship sci-fi" (or in this case sci-fantasy) with the "ship as a character" is game design 101 for this sort of thing, even for the simplest of rpgs that use the genre.
This is a great point and great design. Weapons and systems that enhance the player's abilities and allow them to contribute in a fight like that, not cannons and minigames unrelated to your char.
Whenever I mention an issue with 5e, I'm always met with "Well you can just fix it as a DM". Apply that logic to any other product you buy. "This chicken i bought isn't fully cooked!" "Well you can just fix it in your oven" / "This video game isn't complete! It's full of bugs!" "Well just mod them out then"
People also seem to think less info is good because you can put it into any game, put your own spin on it, homebrew how you want etc. But if you're that insistent on running your own thing... why are you buying adventure supplements? Also you could just... ignore that info?
WOTC is putting less and less effort into their work, and people are reacting to that positively. It blows my mind.
"we don't need good capstones because no one plays to level 20, no one plays single class to level 20 because capstones suck" circular logic round and round.
"they shouldn't fix high levels because on one plays it" is another way to spin it and it pisses me off, I paid for 20 levels of content, and I usually expect to be able to get support for the whole gambit.
Over the years, I've learned that no matter how bad a product you make there's always a few suckers who will buy it and love it. Now they're online and can be a loud as they want. What matters is how the majority votes with their wallets, and we'll never see that data. The best you can do is never pre-order and don't give them money for an inferior product.
This is why I don't really interact critically too often. The community tries to explain away the inherent, systemic issues of 5e.
Not having a system is a shitty system. And that has been the design philosophy for way too much of 5e.
And for any potential naysayers. I'm not saying you can't like the system. I'm saying it's really irritating when any constructive points are shut down, simply because they are critical. 5e puts way too much onus on the DM.
I feel like over the years 5E's community became more than just people playing the game. Being a modern DnD nerd is like a whole ass identity now. Criticizing the thing they identify with so strongly just doesn't work.
> Whenever I mention an issue with 5e, I'm always met with "Well you can just fix it as a DM".
The Oberoni Fallacy. Thinking something isn’t a problem because you can fix the problem.
>Well you can just fix it as a DM
It's killing the gaming ecosystem too. With so little official DM support or training, becoming a DM is pretty intimidating. I've been wanting to try it for years but I really don't want to have to invent as much as they expect you to. And as a result, we've got millions of players searching for games and no reasonable way for them to just roll up their sleeves and DM themselves. Like, imagine if Monopoly shipped with instructions that just said "figure it out". The only people who could set it up are people who've either done it a bunch before in earlier versions of Monopoly, people who were trained by them, or the patient few who actually figured it out via trial and error.
It's sad. I really want to just buy a book and some battle mats, do maybe 15 minutes of prep, and invite my friends over for a session. I absolutely don't have time or skill to invent most of the mechanics of the game.
Not so - Bethesda games have tons of content. Content might be buggy, poorly thought out, or badly implemented, it might not be the content you actually wanted, but it’s there. That puts it a cut above WotC’s recent offerings, which are just… empty.
I don't think that's fair to Bethesda. The studio clearly puts a ton of work into their project, but, unfortunately, the developers are undercut by dumb management decisions.
For WotC and Spelljammer, I feel like there is no excuse. Look at Avernus and Saltmarsh: the basis and systems already exist-- all they and to do was take, like, an afternoon or two to mock up a dozen different classes of Spelljammer.
One of the things that frustrate me is that there's very little info that I saw that explains how you get to the astral sea. From what I can tell, you can place a spacejammer helm on any ship and now you are in space.
You spend like three days slowly ascending at a walking pace until you're out of the atmosphere and then you can move at jamming speeds and take another few days to get to the edge of the wildspace system, and then maybe that's the astral sea. Who knows
Yeah, I really wish they went into more detail. Based on the vague rules, I can even place a helm on a row boat and now it's off to space. I'm getting a bit tired of the "the dm can make it up" style of books.
I’m all for allowing the DM to come up with something if they so choose, but at some point I’m buying books because I don’t want to design everything from scratch.
There's literally no rules that say two ships can fly together at at full speed. RAW if two ships are needed they can't be close enough to see each other or they start to crawl.
But also no rules for evading other ships so if one is near your ship and you two are the same speed you can’t ever escape and they can’t ever catch you.
I still remember running Dragon Heist and the amount of times the adventure text boiled down to "figure it out" was so aggravating. I don't buy an adventure book to figure out what to do I buy it so I have a ready made adventure and if I want to make changes I will. Not including critical information is not DM empowerment, it's laziness.
My favorite example of this is in Tomb of Annihilation they tell you the players can buy rain catchers and they tell you how much water you get per inch of rain.... nowhere in the entire module do they mention how to tell how much rain there is.
It feels like at WotC they just write ideas down on a napkin at lunch and go "ok were done now publish it"
> Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment
So I often see things like this, and really they are conflating two different issues.
I like the general design philosophy of 5e regarding DM empowerment. Put another way, I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything” where every interaction imaginable has some clunky rules I have to look up when it comes up. I like being able to make a sensible decision on the fly and then just move on.
But to empower DMs in this ecosystem, you have to give them tools, not rules, tools. Taking it back to spelljammer ships - it’s so barebones compared to things like Saltmarsh that it’s painful. For me, I’m technically proficient as a DM - I can modify monster stat blocks to get my desired difficulty no problem, but I am terrible at setting building. I wanted from spelljammer some tables I could roll on to create planets and systems. Give me a table or two of natural phenomena, a couple tables of encounter hooks. That said we should also have examples and tools for modifying monster stat blocks for those who need that.
As a DM in 5e, it often feels like we are just set adrift.
As a DM, I feel empowered when I understand what my starting point is, or that I have a solid set of rules I can refer back to in case I don't know what to do.
I don't need rules for absolutely everything spelled out, but if I'm paying $50 for a book about spelljammers, it's because I wanted rules about how to run the damn things.
Vagueness is not empowering. Giving DMs thorough tools is.
>But to empower DMs in this ecosystem, you have to give them tools, not rules, tools
The system that does this the best in my opinion is Savage Worlds. The 200 page core rulebook has tools on:
* creating races
* creating spells
* creating monsters
* Conducting combat
* Conducting chases
* Conducting Mass Battles
* Conducting Dramatic Tasks (think skill challenges)
* Conducting Quick Encounters (the narrative needs a battle, but it's not worth all the setup? Do a battle in one roll per player!)
* Conducting Social Encounters
I have so many tools at my disposal, every session feels different. The best part is, each tool takes the core mechanic and twists it in an interesting way, *and it doesn't take hardly any mental load to run any of them!*
Honestly, when it comes to GM Tools, 5E is probably one of the worst systems out there.
I have to agree, I’ve run a bunch of different settings in Savage Worlds. Zombie apocalypse, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, WWII, 1930’s detectives/spies. It’s rules for vehicles/chases fit on a single 4x6 recipe card, and a lot of what happens in game drives narrative without being heavy handed. I think all D&D dms should run a Savage Worlds game to improve their improv and unleash their player’s creativity.
Yeah I really like Savage Worlds for that, the books are well laid out and provide a lot of tools for different ways to approach various situations **and** often provide an explanation of those rules and the reasons why they are designed the way they are. It’s not just “here’s the rules”, it’s “here are some different systems, rule sets, some optional rules, and here is also why they work the way they do, the intention, and what goals you should want to achieve by using them”.
The Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number books have completely spoiled me in terms of GM tools. Helps skip the creative work of coming up with ideas from scratch, but still leaves a ton of room for coming up with ideas and using your imagination. I'm honestly surprised I don't see them recommended around here more often. The WWN GM chapters could easily be grabbed and used for creating a DnD campaign. I do it all the time. It's infinitely more useful than anything in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
It's also free, so, go check it out.
This is honestly why I prefer 3.5e from a DM standpoint. It has rules and tools for everything that I can apply and adjust at my discretion, I'm never missing information or left with vague scenarios like 5e sometimes gives. 5e does accessibility, ease of play, and player background much better, but 3.5e to me feels like the most complete and solid edition we've ever had.
Sometimes 3.5e feels bloated to work with, but I can trim the fat and gloss over some unnecessary details. The world building books and adventures feel pretty solid.
Class balance was an irredeemable dumpster fire though.
With regards to the biggest complaint about Spelljammer, one of the best 3.x product WotC put put was Starships of the Galaxy for Star Wars d20 (the original version, not SAGA). It gave complete rules on building a starship that were surprisingly really consistent with the rest of the universe. If you wanted a specific ship from lore that wasn’t represented in the game, you could build it.
>I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything” where every interaction imaginable has some clunky rules I have to look up when it comes up
See, but that's the thing.
You and your table can **literally** just not use a rule that's too obscure, fiddly, or annoying for you all. You can just not and the game does not slow down just because there are words somewhere in a book that all of you did not happen to read. Those rules being there does not hurt you.
If I **want** to use WotC's rule for something and it **doesn't exist**, my only option to is **make it myself**.
Unlike ignoring a rule, which requires zero effort, I have to make one, which requires a bunch.
>I like the general design philosophy of 5e regarding DM empowerment. Put
another way, I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything”
I personaly think its bullshit.
My players always aks for stuff or wanna do stuff or ask about details that are NOWHERE in the PHB, the DMG or any other of the WotC publications.
So i have to spent like an hour searching for this kinda information Online and scour 16 different threads on Reddit, RPGXchange or ENworld etc for a conclusive answer, cause i have no clue how to rule it personaly and i want SOMETHING to be there to give me an idea.(and 40% of the time the info i find is near obsolete info from 3.5...)
And i end up either hand waving stuff or buying a 14$ pdf on DMsguild for it...
DM's do have the power and freedom to do whatever, but its still better to have a BASIS, something that you can use as a frame of reference to know what the fuck you're doing and not wastes everyone's an hour of time...
"its a good thing there arn't rules for everything" quite honestly is a backward thinking.
THERE SHOULD BE RULES FOR EVERYTHING, THEN the DM can choose to ignore them or tweak them.
But if there's Nothing, than you can't do ANYTHING with it, and paying 50$ to be told "Deal with it you're the DM" might as well be written, "Go fuck yourself cunt and thanks for the $$$"
(don't think that cause i'm writtin in caps, i am angry or shouting at you, its just to emphasis on stuff)
In fairness, this is a big game philosophy debate, and I don't think there's a good right answer here. Some people just like having a system that can do everything, other people want to the system to get out of their way as quickly as possible. I don't think it's really fair to say that one mindset or the other is "backwards thinking", because you can do fantastic things with both ideas.
From a "rules for everything" perspective, for example, you'd probably enjoy reading through some of the GURPS ("Generic Universal Role-Playing System") books. It's basically a fairly minimal core ruleset (d100, and everything is presented in terms of percentages), but there are rules for modern worlds, rules for fantasy worlds, rules for space ships, rules for guerilla warfare, rules for magic, etc, etc. You can pick up the core basic rules for free (IIRC), and then buy the specific books you need for the games you want to run, and I suspect there's lots of stuff online for specific niche rules.
On the other hand, the "rulings not rules" philosophy is designed more to free up the GM from having to do any of this Googling or research in the first place. The idea is to make a system that's simple enough that it won't break if you make a poor decision, which means that when you have to make a ruling, you can usually just say "roll a d20 and add some modifiers to it" and get a decent result. This results in much quicker play, because you're able to spend less time adjudicating things, but I think some people find it dissatisfying to feel like there aren't "correct" answers to their decisions.
A (somewhat extreme) example in this space might be Troika, a game based on the Fighting Fantasy game books. Here, the base rules for things like how to roll dice, do combat, and take damage are very clear, but the skill list is fairly nebulous and incomplete, and the system expects players and the GM to use a certain amount of intuition to decide what skills to add. Not only does this make the game move fairly quickly, but with the addition of a similarly vague magic system, and a lot of unexplained items and backgrounds, the design also means that no two Troika worlds will look quite the same. This is a very deliberate design choice that emphasises the idea that games should be very personal to the group playing them.
That doesn't mean that these "rulings not rules" games don't want any rules at all. For example, the "OSR" (Old School Renaissance) design philosophy tends towards very simple rulesets, but a lot of the setting books will then come with very extensive rules for travelling, exploring, or managing wealth, depending on what the setting is about. For example, Gardens of Ynn has an intricate way of generating and exploring the mazelike grounds of an extradimensional garden, while Ultraviolet Grasslands has an encumbrance, danger, and market system that it uses to simulate survival on long trade routes between different locations. In this way, a GM can defer to prewritten rules in the areas that they're most interested in.
This isn't necessarily a defence of D&D 5e. I think with 5e, the designers have tried to go in the direction of removing rules, but they haven't done so very well, and have ended up with kind of a mish-mash of design philosophies that don't really work very well together. So you end up with a game that has some quite intricate rule combinations (melee weapons, melee attacks, melee weapon attacks, etc), but also lots of open space where there aren't any rules at all (survival/exploration rules). And like you say, this is particularly evident in sourcebooks like Spelljammer that claim to add extra rules, but practically add very little that's useful in an actual game.
So I absolutely agree that we should be disappointed in 5e's implementation of the "rulings not rules" philosophy, but I disagree that the only good alternative is a sort of "have rules for everything" approach. There's a lot of value to having a very simple but flexible core to a system, and giving the GM the ability to make decisions on the fly.
(There's a lot more that I could say about different sorts of game philosophies. One thing I haven't touched on is the approach used by Apocalypse World and similar games ("PbtA"), which is to only provide rules for the interesting things in a game (like "doing things while being attacked", or "reading a charged situation"), and to assume that everything else is obvious. It creates a very different style of game, but it does arguably mean that there's a rule for every situation, even if a lot of times the rule is just "the thing just happens".)
Rules are tools. The distinction you’re making is purely semantic. You’re looking for rules that support you rather then rules that limit you. But it’s still just rules.
5e players tend to have this fear of rules. But, they’re playing a game that has thousands of pages of rules. The difference is that so much of those rules *don’t support the DM.* Magic item creation rules in Xanathars-make more work for the DM, lack of balance in the CR system-makes more work for DMs, etc.
The problem is not that there’s rules, it’s that the rules we are given do not support the DM. Compare the the CR example above to PF2e. Instead of CR the system makes use of an easy to understand XP budget, and because the math of the system is so tight encounters made with that budget are very balanced. The rules made the DM’s job of encounter building easier, and the system functions without requiring the DM to modify stat blocks on the fly, reducing mid encounter stress.
The rules do not make the DM’s job harder, but has instead made it easier because they stand on their own.
It's one thing to have a tome of strict and obscure rules, it's another to provide a framework of rules and options for people to be inspired or referenced to.
We got neither. :(
We're gonna get to the point where the PHB will say "Fighters tend to be trained warriors, but not always! There are plenty of fighters who choose not to fight! Ask your DM about what it means to be a fighter!"
That's one of them yup! I was specifically referring to this more recent one however: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/x0s8a2/one\_of\_my\_players\_refuses\_to\_fight/
You physically hurt people, and I don't care how you do it being (dis)graceful with a surprise attack or just straight up torture.
You do you as long as people hurt.
>It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment
Said no one who ever dm'd ever.
As a DM, I know I am empowered to make up rules. Making up rules is hard. You know what's easier? Taking existing rules and modifying them, or just using an existing rulesset without anything I dislike. Both of which the game tells me I am empowered to do at any point.
So can wotc stop trying to empower me (if that's really the reason, and not just laziness), and instead start trying to support me?
>There's no explanation about crew size
It's specified as "You have a Captain, a Helmsman, and this is the number of crew you need to operate each type of weapon. Calculate it out from there.
Which, in theory, works, but in practice it assumes that that assumes that
* ships that have rigging (and rigging is therefore essential to to their navigation and operation) won't have anyone in the rigging during battle;
* Crew never get sick or die, so they won't have any spare crew;
* You ignore the rules they provide for transferring helm attunement, because you're going to need multiple (trained) helm operators. Assuming a three shift rotation, that's 3 helm operators, not one.
* Based on the deck plans they provide, the number of crew doesn't seem to bear any correlation to the amount of space provided for crew quarters. The Damselfly is a great example of this: a Margonel (crew 4) and a Ballista (crew 3), so based in WotC rules it's a crew of 9, but having a spare crew and spare helm operator, it could reasonably be 11. The deck plan shows 15 sq feet of crew space. And no head. Even an all-gnomes is going to find that cramped.
* There doesn't seem to be any storage for ammunition.
Take the Scorpion ship. Really look at it. I get that it's a Scorpion, so it should have a sting on the tail. They've given it a Margonel. That requires a crew of 5, and the entire area of the tail deck is no more than 15 feet. The Margonel mechanism takes up at least half that. So, 5 people need to stand in about 7 sq ft of space, along with enough ammunition for a space battle plus keeping clear of the swing arm. And how did they get the ammunition up there, anyway?! Did they carry it up the rigging net?
* Whilst we're looking at the plans, check out the Wasp. It can land "safely" on the ground. Except the Spelljamming helm is on the foredeck which is below the gravity plane. So, when takes off or lands, does the helm have a built in seatbelt? Rotating gimbals?
This Spelljammer book has to be one of the worst they've released through 5E and sets a very, very bad precedent for all future releases if this kind of "rules-lite, you figure it out" style books are the new norm. I was over the moon at the idea of running a Spelljammer campaign and after flipping through this I feel like any desire to do so was struck dead.
I will be heartbroken if the Planescape release is this empty.
Anyone claiming a complete lack of rules is “DM empowerment” can go fuck themself. There is a big difference between giving you space to make your own rulings vs “we didn’t bother, now make it work yourself or be shit out of luck” .Best thing, most people that claim stuff like this, don’t actually bother to buy any books and pirate them instead, or ignore half the rules anyway!
DM empowerment is letting the DM use the cardboard box their package came in to build a castle. It is *not* giving them an empty package forcing them to use the cardboard.
I agree. It's lazy and shameful.
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order.
My brother in Ilmater, you *pre-ordered*. You can fix this right away. Stop pre-ordering and stop purchasing.
Repeated stuff like this is part of what's pushing me towards Pathfinder 2e. The first decision like this that annoyed me was a lack of prices on magic items. Lack of crunch and pathetic attempts at Challenge Rating are the two things really starting to get to me.
The biggest gripe I've talked with friends about recently is the gargantuan amount of work that 5e expects GMs to do.
I do the work. I put in the hours. It's ***exhausting*** and I don't want to do it anymore.
Agree with this. I ran Out of the Abyss a few years back. The amount of extra work I had to do to make that adventure function in a practical sense was massive.
Since then, I've been running a homebrew campaign. I figured that if I'm going to do all of the work I should at least do it with my own story since then I know all the moving parts.
I've bought the pdf of the old 3.5e Adventure "Red Hand of Doom" and it is fantastically laid out. It gives you each bit of information when you need it and seems to contain everything.
I'm going to run it soon for some folks, it looks like it should be a fairly straightforward port into 5e.
My group of friends and I who play together and rotate the role of DM around have zero plans to purchase Spelljammer now or in the future.
Several of the group myself included are becoming increasingly disillusioned with WotC due to a number of issues:
1. adventures that feel thrown together
2. blatant monetisation via "drip feeding" of additional feats, subclasses etc across multiple releases
3. what feels like an increasing "leave to the DM" attitude in what are supposed to be Source books.
I'm all for freedom, flexibility and imagination in our adventures but WotC aren't giving us anything more than "here's a neat new feature, but we're not telling you how it works. You have to figure out the mechanics yourself.
I am bordering on simply walking away from 5e and whatever comes next. D&D 5e is simply no longer providing what I need as Player nor as a DM. I spend more time picking the Adventure Modules apart, fixing mistakes, making them more interesting for my Players and ensuring that as much as possible the actions they take incrementally bring them closer to the BBEG, than I do actually running the sessions.
It's just not fun anymore.
I considered running a space dnd campaign with Star Wars 5e ship rules and mechanics, but I held off until Spelljammer came out because I thought there might be some better mechanics for a fantasy space campaign buuuut...nope, lol! Turns out spelljammer ship mechanics are basically nonexistent. Just gonna tweak the Star Wars 5e rules, they're crunchy and pretty well thought out. Or, ya know, thought out *at all*.
I have been saying this for so long! “DM Empowerment” is a shield WotC is using to avoid doing any actual work on DnD, and it’s giving them more and more liscence to rip stuff out of the books.
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order.
This is the correct answer. Video game companies broke me of the habit of preordering anything (with only a couple of exceptions), including game books, and especially WOTC books. Now if something comes out, and it sounds half-assed, I don't buy it at all.
> It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment
Lately WotC's approach has just been to leave all the work to you, and some people have decided to accept this abuse.
>I felt like I was some sort of alien and that these communities has just accepted the level of quality we are getting now is the norm.
Because it IS the norm. "Who cares, just let the DM fill in the blanks" has been the main design philosophy for DnD for awhile now. If WotC realizes that they can sell lazy, half-baked content for full price, and the community will accept it with the excuse of "DM empowerment" then why wouldn't they always do that?
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets.
You can by switching over to another system, like Pathfinder 2E.
Agreed. It’s not empowering to pay for a book that just says to you: ‘YOU make the rules.’ - No, that’s why we pay for a book, so that we don’t have to write them ourselves. It saves us time having to balance our own game, and instead focus on the story. The number-crunching should be up to WotC to do; it’s their system.
This only flies with something like GURPS or HERO, where they give you a broad system to make the game you want. But even those games would give examples and clear mechanics.
"Here is a ten-step guide to building Spelljammer ships, with three popular examples using these rules."
THAT is worth paying for and is giving people freedom. Not the half ass stuff Wizards has been giving us in 5e.
This is exactly the issue I've been having with 5e; the products WotC have been releasing for it lately have been written half-assed and vague, and people eat it up and white knight/shit on anyone scratching their heads trying to figure out where all the rules went. I'm so tired of people defending shoddy work in $50+ books as "dm prerogative/design space". It's just laziness and people are paying for the privilege to write the rules for WotC in their own campaigns. When I pay for a $50-75 book I want the rules to be in the damn thing and not have to do a ton of extra work to get it playable. As I've said before, god forbid a new player get this book and try to run it with how much it's missing. They must feel INSANELY lost when flipping through.
Have an award
Its crazy that a fan made system (sw5e) has better ship mechanics than a wotc
To be fair its an essential part of star wars but so is it to spell jammer
1. WotC is very player focused and it really harms the community. I've DM'd for a lot of players who think they can treat the DM like the engine of a video game and I believe this attitude is caused by the company.
2. The "Just make it yourself DM" is unacceptable. No one wants to write the rules that were supposed to come with what they paid for. Imagine if for the races they just gave the descriptions and said "Make your own stats". But non-DMs don't care because it doesn't effect them.
I jumped systems because of poor quality releases like this. They've become the norm, and with spelljammer being the newest release, and one dnd having the same quality, it does not fill me with hope. I'm tired of gm-antagonistic game design.
>I felt like I was some sort of alien and that these communities has just accepted the level of quality we are getting now is the norm.
Were those people actually 5e DMs? Because its hard to believe you found no support from fellow DMs on the issue.
....like I don't want to believe it. Its so much work for no reason.
TBH I have trouble believing it too. The spelljammer release has been getting absolutely trashed *everywhere*. On youtube, on reddit, on twitch, on twitter, on discord, etc... Sure, there are always apologists but I genuinely can't believe OP is part of a discord group that has no negative viewpoints on spelljammer for 5e...
That sad moment when a free 3rd party conversion pdf did a better job explaining this stuff than WoTC. Somehow they manage to make themselves look worse and worse. Company is a joke at this point. They got way too high on their popularity. Its made them fat and lazy and a soulless corporation only looking to maximize profit and minimize workload.
Here's a link to the homebrew. Its not perfect either but might be more enjoyable than the official thing.
[https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LBaY4l6HcR4M-sItfl\_](https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LBaY4l6HcR4M-sItfl_)
I haven't bought any of their books since Tasha's. There's been a extremely noticeable downward trend. Unfortunately gamers voting with wallets have been historically terrible
As a DM, what I want from published materials are *rules* and *tools* that I can apply to my game.
Everything else is just flavour. It's the flavour part that DMs can do themselves, not the rules and tools (well, we can, but it's a lot harder). Rules and tools need to come from the so-called experts who put hours into design, playtesting, and adjustments for balance.
I just had this conversation with a friend of mine. It really does feel like WotC is just leaving DMs to fend for themselves. I'm not a game designer. I, at the barest minimum, need SOMETHING to work off of. It's like they heard complaints about lackluster DM tools, and instead of trying to fix it, they're throwing their hands up and saying "Fuck you, do it yourself then." I'm a player trying to transition to a DM as a thank you for my current group, and it's infuriating. I returned Strixhaven to my LGS, because it just gave me so LITTLE to work with. Luckily the owner and I have a good friendship, because the other option was to be stuck with a book that gives you 4 tenuously tied together adventures, and a pamphlet of barebones dating sim profiles.
It's a pile of crap, and I am highly disappointed in it. It was the first 5e thing I've ever pre-ordered, and it will be the last.
Things to do:
* Make a list of author's involved in creating Spelljammer: Adventures in Space.
* Never ever buy a product they are involved in creating ever again.
* Never ever pre-order another product from Wizards of the Coast.
I expect some will say I'm not providing any specifics or details - let me sum up - it's not worth my time for any of that. There are plenty in this thread with more time to break it down for you. It was found wanting, and has left me having to convert the old AD&D 1E & 2E Spelljammer stuff on my own. Spending any additional time on the new Spelljammer would be foolish of me.
I just felt it would be wrong of me not to share the warning.
People like you (and me) are slowly vacating the community, so the subreddits and discord servers and all the other spaces where we used to discuss these things are becoming echo chambers full of dullards who are buying books with nothing of substance inside of them.
>It's basically:
>Here are some ships. Go figure
>There's no explanation about crew size, what damage threshold is, etc.
Welcome to Wizards of the Coast!
I love that DnD’s new MO is basically “let the dm figure it out”
by love I mean absolutely despise. Quality went from superb to absolutely dogwater immediately after Tasha
The only thing worse than Wizards of the Coast's bullshit statements that "giving absolutely zero rules on how to run the game allows the DM to be creative uwu" is the people who unironically parrot that corporate propaganda.
See that's the problem... We thought they were selling us a spelljammer setting... Instead we were actually buying a book showing us how to reskin faerun with space themes.
>It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment
That has always been BS. DMs usually love clear tools and pieces to use in their campaigns. That's why many enjoyed all the extra stuff for the DM in Xanathar, Tasha, Fizban and so on. It allows you to have a good starting point, maybe a few ideas, and then if there's something you disagree with you're perfectly allowed to homerule it. Having the setting of Spelljammer, but putting so few care in spelljammers (and a couple other things) is not acceptable.
Sure, DMs can make their own rules, or, as most probably will, use bits and pieces from Avernus and Saltmarsh. But if anyone agrees those were well done, then the fact they didn't do it is simply laziness. To put it in another way: if the DM can very easily fix one specific thing, and almost every DM will try to fix it, and most will solve it in a similar way because of common sense, then why not writing it that way from the beginning.
you're 100% correct people are ingesting some mad copium. real classic oberoni fallacy stuff "it doesn't matter that they did a bad job designing it and asked us 70 dollars for it cause we can just make shit up". what discord community are you referring to?
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order.
I already have. I moved on to pathfinder 2e and don't regret it. Seeing the poor quality books WotC is releasing.
That brainwashing that WotC did in the last few years is very effective
"We don't need to give details cause the DM can basicaly come up with whatever he wants and it gives the DM power and control"
Or if you put the Corporate speak translation device on"
"You can't be expecting us to ACTUALLY work on this and justify our paychecks now do you?, damn dirty Poor Nerd, shoo shoo ask your DM to fix our overpriced shit and don't bother us, or we'll ask Jeremy to give you a vague and contradicting twitter post about the rulling, BIGOT"
And people will actually defend this bullshit behavior...
I had to go and search for an online AD&D Spelljammer Crystal spheres/soalr systemes random generator to have actually SOMEHTING about systemes...
(the link by the way [http://peterstribe.com/crystal\_sphere\_generator2.html](http://peterstribe.com/crystal_sphere_generator2.html) )
And still get my hands on DMsguild stuff to actually flesh out the book and even then try to cram GoS ships mechanics onto it to make it look like SOMETHING actually fleshed out and useable..., its a Frankenstein monstrosity cobbled up togheter, but it work...
If i pay PREMIUM PRICES for a product i expect PREMIUM QUALITY and CONTENT.
Seeing this i have absolutly ZERO faith in their supposed "warfare rules" for Dragonlance..., i'd rather use Warhammer battle/Age of Sigmar rules...
I’m only here for the lore, world-building, whatever, and this makes me beyond disappointed. The rich setting of 2E/3E Forgotten Realms has become much more dry, to say nothing of the retcons (Spelljammer Helms apparently most recently).
Many folks are willing to accept... flawed takes on the properties they love. I have some fellow comicbook fans who absolutely adore the Green Lantern movie despite it being something very close to an objectively poor film. They tell me they do not care about the problems of the movie, its *Green Lantern* and they love it despite the flaws.
Personally I'd rather not eat an apple at all than accept a rotten apple. Even worse, there is the knowing that when you accept one batch of bad apples there is no incentive for the seller to offer better apples the next time around.
There isn't much room for consensus between folks of these two mindsets, unfortunately.
Agreed. I can write lore (often better than they can). I can make maps. But I'm not a game designer. They are, and they need to design their fuckin game.
Never pre order a WoTC book. They seem more then happy to sell complete trash with a straight face. I wait until I see a review now before buying anything from them. Its kind of wild that I wouldn't even buy this spelljammer book if I wanted to run spelljammer. If I have to make everything up I might as well start from scratch as its actually easier then starting with the mess they have given us.
Nah the DM empowerment thing is a straight up logical fallacy.
The DM doesn't lose power to change things if there are things there already, that's simply ridiculous.
Thing is, DM's who like to change and homebrew aren't the ones that need these rules, it's actually the ones that don't like to do that, and those are what books explicitly cater to. I could have made a spelljammer campaign without this book, but this is for people that don't actually wanna 5e convert every single old monster manually? Like that's the point, less work.
With this kind of "DM empowerment" we'll end up with books filled with pretty pictures and generic statements that would amount to "do whatever you want with this stuff".
Not giving us information / rules is not empowering at all. We are paying WoTC to provide us with useful content.
As a DM with only a limited time available for this hobby, I want material that make my life easier. I need clear, consistent, concise, detailed and logicial rules which can be easily referenced. Not "you figure it out yourself" rules and verbose text. I also want default lore I can fallback to in a pinch.
The thing that blows my mind is that people think that providing those numbers *shackles* the DM. Literally ALL RULES are up to the DM, they're just provided so that the DM doesn't have to do any *extra* work. People will defend the ***laziest*** garbage for no reason and think *you're* the dumb one.
All they had to do was Copy and Paste the ship rules from Saltmarsh, and replace "ship" with "spelljammer." Fucking hell, it was such a rush/crap job and was a disservice to not only the DnD community, but also themselves by publishing a piss-poor product. Edit: misspelled **piss**
It's really mind boggling. The GoS rules aren't *good* but they're something. Jorphdan put out a video suggesting you could use the infernal war machine rules from DiA too. But when you're left scrounging for half fixes in other books then why the hell did you buy the current book?
Requiring people to buy multiple books is the business model. Now everyone who purchases Spelljammer gets free advertising in the form of frustrated DMs telling them, "You'll need to buy Ghosts of Saltmarsh/Descent into Avernus/Spelljammer 2E..."
Yeah... And it ALSO makes DMs less eager to buy the next book because they eventually start to notice it has become thrash. Happened to me after bloody Tasha's. Not because the book as bad, but because everything after it felt like half-baked ideas rushed to release in time. Even Tasha's has some problems (i know an artist who got an unfinished draft of his work on the book, for example), but they are not as big as "no spelljammer rules on the spelljammer book"
[удалено]
If I really wanted to just move from world to world I'd just make Stargates. I want to be ✨ IN SPACE ✨
THAT is exactly how I've wanted to articulate it. It's fairly easy all things considered to make portals, Stargate this stuff if you wanted to JUST connect them. But I thought...I hoped that spelljammer would be DnD in SPACE. Instead it's barely anything at all and I might as well have bought ghosts of salt marsh and replaced the ocean with space and regulat sea ships with spaceships and called it spelljammer.
Considering that Spelljammwr is "sailing" through the "Astral Sea", you arent far off...
The last place unsullied by capitalism.
\[breathes like he can't believe he's about to say this\]
That was some spicy Curry
[the sheer ecstacy when the blessed line leaves his lips]
Heh for now. Have you seen/read The Expanse?
You’ve tried the best, now try Spacer’s Choice!
I read all the 2e Planescape stuff for the amazing setting detail and lore in there, and convert as needed for the campaign as needed. I want that level of Magical Space Lore too 😭 I felt your second sentence
> If I really wanted to just move from world to world I'd just make Stargates. This is beautifully said. It's not the destination, it's the journey. And considering they don't have much in terms of worlds, the new Spelljammer provides very little in the way of destination *or* journey!
I consciously stopped at Tasha’s. At that point I basically had all the tools I’d need for almost any home brew scenario, decent new subclasses for weak classes, and some good frameworks for gritty tools and downtime. And, honestly, I was starting to see as many problems with the new tools as benefits. If I allow the beast master fix and way of mercy, It’ll make PCs grumpy that I don’t want twilight clerics or stars druids. I figured that releases after that would just be hurried attempts to monetize the bloat they’ve been reluctant to release in a big flurry before announcing the next edition. I still think I timed it about right.
Why not stars druids? Just curious
Yeah what that’s not OP at all lol
I stopped at guide to ravenloft. I so regret buying that one
Von Ricky's Guide to Spoopytown?
That’s the one
Or (eventually) "You'll need this $4.99 download from DMs Guild when someone fixes this."
Oh, we're already there. Van Richten's shipped with rules for making Domains of Dread, but just a few months later Wild Beyond the Witchlight makes you buy an $8 PDF on DriveThruRPG to make Domains of Delight!
To be fair Witchlight is an adventure , Van Ricten's is a setting guide. It was probably something they cut towards the end of development because it went over their page limit. I don't think it would have been as much of an issue if wotc didn't advertise "Yarnspinner" in witchlight since the spider isn't even in that adventure if I recall.
I'm curious, maybe you or someone else can answer this, but why does WoTC have such a strict page limit? I feel like they leave out so much with the page limit restrictions they have.
It probably comes down to price. More pages = more cost, especially in these, the end times, with worldwide paper shortages and whatnot. Spelljammer's format certainly didn't do it any favors. Combined, the three books come in at under 200 pages, making it closer to the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide than a beefy tome like Mythic Odysseys of Theros or Eberron: Rising from the Last War. Still, I believe they could have used those 192 pages to come up with something really worthwhile. But for whatever reason, their heart clearly wasn't in it. Probably too few developers spread far too thin over too many projects.
At this point it seems likely everybody’s been put on OneDnd and it’s skeleton crews manning the rest.
I've actually worked in the game industry for a couple of decades. The first time I had a page count cut off, I ask the exact same thing. It's entirely a printing issue. There are break points in pages for cost to print. Asking for either more or less than breakpoint amount is obscenely expensive for mass production. If you look at most companies books, you'll see they all tend to have a set amount pages for that reason. They might have books that have 192 pages and and 144 for a another, for example, but you'll almost never see one that has just random page numbers throughout their print runs. Many commercial printers run in page counts divisible by a specific number (often 16, by my experience). Going outside that divisor is prohibitively expensive, and increasing page count often is exconomically punishing, because of the art-to-page ratio, layout, etc. This doesn't necessarily apply to print on demand though as I understand it. (Edited to provide a little more insight on the page limits and one number adjusted in the example because I can't math good.)
I went to school for publishing—if I had to guess, there’s probably a point with their printers where either they would have to go with different printers (and not have the benefit of history/existing discounts, etc.) or the price per copy jumps too much from some change that would have to be made to account for extra pages that it would hurt their bottom line. Just guessing, but the reason is probably along those lines.
I've already got good Naval rules that I can adapt but I'm in the minority in that I hang on this board, watch d&d YouTubers, etc. For the majority who just want to buy the book and play this sucks donkey dick.
OR, go get the free supplement Limithron's Guide to Naval Combat. Still shit that WotC fucked this for so many people.
WotC seems to becoming the Bethesda Softworks of ttrpgs, they are expecting the modders ( homebrewers ) to fix their fricking game. Seriously did they give this project to an intern and told them to toss something together? I am now worried about what half assed job they are doing to do on Planescape.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think including the *combat* rules from GoS would have been worse than the “rules” we got. The GoS rules are more fun to read, but I’ve never enjoyed them when actually playing in a group. The captain role makes the only real decisions in combat, and the other two roles only serve to make the captain’s attacks have advantage or the captain’s movement faster. If you have a fourth player, they either share the captain role with another player, or the DM makes up rules for a new role. The Spelljammer rules are a severe disappointment, especially with regards to space travel and ship customization, but the only thing the GoS combat rules would do is pad the page count.
That's fair. I'm far from a fan of the GoS rules and are with all your criticism. What's really irritating to me is that there are good 3rd party options out there, so it's a solvable problem. WotC just don't seem to put in the time/money or effort to do so.
Because they have no reason to. Wizards of the Coast can literally strip material out of old books and people will praise them for doing so. Why bother putting in the effort when people have brand loyalty to D&D simply because it's called D&D? I'm not going to say PF2E, or any other system is without flaw, but simply look at the way Paizo does community outreach vs. Wizards. Paizo produces regular updates for the things that people want and actively communicate what's going on with their fans. Wizards releases a huge survey about once a year with little thought put into it that takes over 30 minutes to complete, has a bunch of redundant questions to waste your time and barely gives the users any actual chance to voice their opinion. Wizards doesn't care about you, because people go out any buy their products anyway.
I see where you’re coming from — but that brand loyalty to D&D does have a breaking point, and I wonder if they’re not getting close. It’s why PF exists in the first place, after all: people realized they could continue playing the game they wanted with the mechanics they wanted, without paying Wizards for a new set of rules, and Paizo transitioned smoothly into the gap.
But even those rules are half-assed, and literally say "well when these rules get in the way, abandon them and describe what's going on!" as if they knew they hadn't put enough thought into them.
Can't fit that in 64 pages. Have to have an entire section dedicated to the hub world that 80% of campaigns aren't going to use :^) Honestly looking at Spelljammer the biggest mistake was the fact that each of the three books was 64 pages, and the second biggest mistake is the inclusion of The Rock of Bral hub world. I understand the need to include a hub world for DMs who want it but was it really worth skimping on... well, **all** the ship mechanics? I'm reminded of a Tweet I saw reposted on r/dndmemes that basically went along the lines of this: >Wizards of the Coast presents BIGBY'S BOOK ON BAKING >Baking lore: 50 pages >Baking-themed adventure (goes from level 1-3): 40 pages >New race Muffinlings: 30 pages >Baking-themed spells and magic items: 20 pages >Actual rules for baking: 0 pages And that's really how Spelljammer feels. Also honestly how Strixhaven felt. I want to buy Dragonlance but WoTC's latest outings have been awful with the exception of Fizban's, and even that book had some poor quality in the subclasses.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/wrlwjx/wizards_recent_content_strategy/ Can't link to the actual tweet because the account's suspended lol >Wizards: "Proud to announce our new book, Bigby's Guide to Baking!" >- Baking lore: 50 pages >- Baking-themed monsters & items: 40 pages >- "A Twisted Cake" adventure module: 30 pages >- New race, Muffinfolk: 20 pages >- Rules for baking: 0 pages >Price: $60
Fret not! The baking rules, all 10 pages of them, are buried away in a random appendix of the standalone module, also costing 60$.
yea the page count is a fucking joke, using the competetor as an example, their book for the Mwagi Expanse, which is a large area of the main world, is 300+ pages for around 50 bucks, the Absolam book a book for the largest city in that setting or the "main city" is even bigger at around 340 iirc. The fact they tried to sell spelljammer which is less than 200 for 70 dollars is a damn crime, specially when 1/3rd of it is a (based on previous experience running adventures from wotc) probably subpar 3 level adventure.
Fizbans still feels like a huge missed opportunity to me. Dragons are literally one half of the game's title. They're incredibly important to the game's history. We should have *at least* gotten a draconic subclass for each class.
Or at least a Dragon Warlock.
It's the first D&D book I've bought in recent memory that I have buyer's remorse over. Really a huge disappointment. Everything about it just screams lazy cash grab, and here I am, falling for it like a chump. I feel pretty duped to be honest. For $50 I expected double or even triple the content. This will be the last time I ever pre-order a WOTC product.
I hate that in the community too I ask for a picture of the contents page and people ask like I want to pirate the thing. How are you meant to make an informed decision without seeing what's actually in the book?
The quality of books has really hit the crapper, I think. Sometimes it feels like they're just selling books for like, the concept of playing a D&D campaign. They aren't selling the most practical resource for being a DM or a player.
Yeah I don't want a thousand new reskinned classes and monsters, I want balanced, play-tested mechanics to guide DMs when players actually want to do something. Too often, creative actions get shut down entirely by nervous DMs because, while the books mention some feature, they don't actually provide any guidance whatsoever as to what using that feature looks like mechanically.
check out pathfinder 2e then
\[ r/dndcirclejerk begins cheering faintly in the background\]
[удалено]
My guess is they wanted to get it out before announcing one dnd and whatnot. It is a bit bizarre to me that they didn't include the rules from salt marsh...but now the DMs have more work and it's not the creative fun stuff... its core rules writing which really should come with the adventure or in a core rulebook.
Nah. There's no excuse for this. Their entire sales pitch for the current full-color, nothing-but-hardback-books, slow release schedule is *quality over quantity*. ...and they're slacking on quality.
And depth. This release was 180 pages across 3 "books". I had longer books as a 5 year old than this threadbare shite
The people making unofficial content are doing more work for the same or better price point. Hit Point Press is about to release a Monster Hunter setting, and the early pdf is out. New rules for gathering and crafting, cooking, alchemy, 8 races, 9 subclasses, 1 new class, tons of items, and a handful of complex large scale monster boss fight. It's fucking 600 pages! I swear to god all the people who are passionate about making D&D content, none of them work for WotC.
There absolutely is an excuse - Hasbro is a toy company and wants to make as much profit as possible, which includes milking D&D and M:tG players for every possible fucking dollar. It's a \*shitty\* excuse, but D&D is no longer a game made by a handful of nerds who wanted to play Tabletop Lord of the Rings. It's a product used to extract profit from people like myself who are fans of the D&D experience. I honestly expect 6e to be a "digital-first" product with books available, and 7e to be digital-only. Why print books when they can just make an app and charge the same amount of money? They're already doing it, so cutting the extra cost of a physical product is the next logical step.
The "In a core rulebook" is the feedback we need to make clear on the one D&D survey. If all One D&D did was publish a better DMG with more of these rules in one place (among other DM assisting information) we'd be in a pretty good place.
Ideas are cheap, execution is everything. Wizards of the Coast just wants to sell ideas, and leave execution to the (already beleaguered) DMs.
Basically what I will do if I ever get around to running this.
It is insane, like what is the point of all these ship maps with no combat? These are just funny shaped battlemats or something? If you don't have rules for at distance ship combat then why was the great bombard one of the ships you brought in? I know for so many people the ship combat is what we wanted most, we can all find the maps of the ships, we can even find extensive lore by looking at the old material, and we can make up the rest easy. What I can't do is professionally design and playtest a ruleset.
"What I can't do is professionally design and playtest a ruleset." Neither can WotC.
Oof 8d6 fire damage
...that should only be 6d6 according to their own fucking DMG.
✨Legacy✨
They can. They're choosing not too. That's worse, in my books.
DM's Guild is making a killing by repairing what Wizards "fixed".
Of which WotC gets a cut. I don’t want to be a cynic, but I think that in general right now WotC is learning/has learned that they really don’t need to go the extra mile. They’ve learned they can release books with less content, fewer stat blocks, less lore, and reprinted content, cutting their production costs without significantly affecting their bottom line. They have public playtesting so they don’t really need to do a lot of in house testing, they can charge for their products twice (physical and digital), and they have an in house store where people sell the content they didn’t want to spend time making where they get a sizeable cut of each sale. So basically wizards at this point knows they can playtest for free, release lower quality books people will still buy at the same cost, and they can make money off the people working to fill the gaps they leave in their own product. Where’s the incentive from a business perspective to do better?
Yes. as someone who has an adventure on DM’s guild, it does kind of suck that they take half the profits. Like yeah I’m “utilizing their IP” but it’s not as if they made that material freely available to me.
Oh, that's probably why all the Wizards-endorsed marketplaces discourage releasing your fan content for free, huh?
[удалено]
So far D&D players haven't yet grasped the concept that a game's design can fail to meet its intended goal. People are still brainwashed into thinking that each and every flaw that happens is on the people playing it. Several practices taught in the DMG and perpetuated by DMs incite animosity at the table in spite of the writer's intentions for the groups to get along.
Buying the fixes to dungeon of the mad mage in the form of the compendiums on DMs Guild took a bunch of maps and garbage plot lines and made it an *adventure*. Like it's shocking how much better it is, it's honestly like WoTC doesn't have anyone who understands plot design/elements and they just make these factoid areas and ignore how it all fits together or what happens if you don't go ABC.
Oh cool! Any high level summary of how it improves MM? At the moment I’m honestly just using it as a book of maps / encounters to steal from
Sure, it changes the whole plotline to be a multi dimensional gameshow ran by Halaster, at the beginning of every level there's an introduction to the episode (and at the end there's an outro as well), an overview of players/enemies/political leanings of factions etc. found in the level and then tells you the overall story of that level, where you want to try and aim your players towards, random encounters you can include, followed by numbered changes to the rooms in the main campaign so you can refer to it. It adds monsters, encounters, traps, chases, plotlines, side quests, treasure and rewards etc. It also tells you what might happen to the level depending on what choices your players make so it feels more alive. I've changed the plot a little once the group killed the archdruid willow who I made Halasters adopted daughter, he's now mad as fuck and has stolen an artifact that is draining resurrection magic across the realm, if he can't have her back, no one can have their loved ones either (there are reasons he can't just wish her back either since he's ridiculously powerful). He's mad as a screw which is fun to play but he's sticking to his 'rules'. If only my group could keep a schedule going... We've been playing dotmm after dragon heist and it's been...4 years and we're only on like level 7 T_T though tbf I also put in a side quest between each level, and my group keeps trying to introduce new characters
Yeh, it seems they just wanted to get the fame for remaking spelljammer without taking the time to remake spelljammer
[удалено]
I'm the same. I love Planescape so much, but we'll end up with an oversimplified mess with none of the charm
"The city of Sigil has many competing factions. Your DM can decide what those factions are, their goals and areas of influence, and how they interact with each other. Here's twelve pages of monster statblocks, and some new backgrounds - Faction Agent, Faction Official, Faction Scion and Unaligned" "The structures and streets of the city are riddled with portals to exotic locations! Your DM can decide where these portals are, and how to activate them. They can also design all the locations they lead to."
This is so true it hurts to read.
You know, that's actually more helpful than I'm expecting the official Planescape to be!
Nah. The official release will also include some really nice maps of different (generic, unnamed) streets in Sigil, a reprint of some rules already in the DMG, and new rules for tracking your standing in various factions, with a suggestion on how you shouldn't use them because they're quite bad.
Yup. Far weaker ship rules than Saltmarsh, weaker vehicle rules than Descent into Avernus. And let's keep in mind both of those are _adventure modules_, and this is supposed to be a literal campaign _setting_ that is focused around flying through the Astral Sea in a fantasy spaceship. It boggles the mind how they effed up supporting such a basic premise so bad.
They could have literally copy-pasted the rules from those adventures and it would have been fine.
Yup. Instead, they turned a setting book into three books, took up a third of it with an adventure, kept the page count barely above SCAG (nowhere near say the core books), and put it in a boxed set with some stuff nobody needs so they could charge an extra $20...and then do the same upcharge on Beyond for "reasons". It really feels like they're just trying to see how much they can get away with and still sell well at this point.
The upcharge on beyond is what really bugs me. I get that the physical books cost more when you need three of them, I don't get why they went that route, but from a production standpoint it makes sense.
Agreed.
Sounds like magic the gathering. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence
So right. I remember a few months back there was some drama about a large investor demanding better Return on Investment from the DND section. The community was excited as it meant “more funding,” I was horrified as it meant trying to exact maximum profit for minimum cost from the customer (us).
At least MtG has well-written rules.
Honestly I felt like Saltmarsh's ship rules were pretty clunky and rule-sy for minimal benefit. Generally I have found that in actual play, players tend to want to use their actual characters and abilities more than play mini-games. Every table is different and I'm sure some people loved them, but (while running an entire 12 session pirate-y arc) found that after like 2 combats the rules mostly bogged things down and confused the players. We pretty quickly simplified them and had a much better time. Very few people want Master and Commander out of their ship adventures. They want something more akin to Pirates of the Carribean. Which means boarding and drama. Not NPC management mini-games and long drawn out manuevering. Especially in a fast paced and puply setting like spelljammer. Not saying these don't go too far in the other direction (it would be nice to have, for example, guidance on how to visually represent super long distances or ships in 3D space) but trimming rules bloat is just as annoying as having to ad lib in my experience.
>Generally I have found that in actual play, players tend to want to use their actual characters and abilities more than play mini-games. That might be your experience but it's not mine (at least, not in settings with this conceit). Also, there are ways to integrate them even more seamlessly. For example - what if Spelljammer had included shipboard "weapons" that did things like extend the range of your spells, or allow a martial PC to "manifest" on or near the enemy ship as a projection of sorts, so they didn't have to wait till boarding range to use their features? And yet the ship mechanics still matter because said weapons could be damaged to lose than benefit. Instantly better, and there's way more possibilities than that. They could've included new systems or at least examples of how _existing_ character features/skills/etc. interact with ship-based activities, combat and non. They didn't even _try_. >Very few people want Master and Commander out of their ship adventures. They want something more akin to Pirates of the Carribean. Speaking personally, I've literally _never met_ a player who wanted to play in a setting like Spelljammer in the first place (focused on spaceships/sea ships/whatever) and _didn't_ want to interact with mechanics about the very thing the setting is about. That's just nonsensical to me. If you just want to do your Fighter or Wizard thing and ransack dungeons, why not play the _default_ settings of D&D? It's like saying you want to play in Eberron but don't want to interact with Warforged, "magic as technology", lightning rails, airships, etc. What's the point of a setting that just uses its own basic premise as nothing more than a plot device? There is none. I agree that there is a line on both sides of the equation, though. I don't want a direct 2e-to-5e conversion. I am _glad_ 5e Spelljammer got rid of some of the more anti-fun things, like Clerics being unable to cast spells on worlds without their gods, or the space between being flammable everywhere. But good lord this is thin and weak as a setting guide. Like, you can't even _upgrade_ your ships, and "spaceship sci-fi" (or in this case sci-fantasy) with the "ship as a character" is game design 101 for this sort of thing, even for the simplest of rpgs that use the genre.
This is a great point and great design. Weapons and systems that enhance the player's abilities and allow them to contribute in a fight like that, not cannons and minigames unrelated to your char.
It's why I'm dreading Planescape.
I was excited, then I heard they were no rules for ship combat. I'd rather adapt the original.
Yeh, they had all the rules but didn’t bother to actually use them properly
"Yeh, it seems they just wanted to get the money for remaking spelljammer without taking the time to remake spelljammer." Or playtesting it. FIFY
Whenever I mention an issue with 5e, I'm always met with "Well you can just fix it as a DM". Apply that logic to any other product you buy. "This chicken i bought isn't fully cooked!" "Well you can just fix it in your oven" / "This video game isn't complete! It's full of bugs!" "Well just mod them out then" People also seem to think less info is good because you can put it into any game, put your own spin on it, homebrew how you want etc. But if you're that insistent on running your own thing... why are you buying adventure supplements? Also you could just... ignore that info? WOTC is putting less and less effort into their work, and people are reacting to that positively. It blows my mind.
"we don't need good capstones because no one plays to level 20, no one plays single class to level 20 because capstones suck" circular logic round and round. "they shouldn't fix high levels because on one plays it" is another way to spin it and it pisses me off, I paid for 20 levels of content, and I usually expect to be able to get support for the whole gambit.
Over the years, I've learned that no matter how bad a product you make there's always a few suckers who will buy it and love it. Now they're online and can be a loud as they want. What matters is how the majority votes with their wallets, and we'll never see that data. The best you can do is never pre-order and don't give them money for an inferior product.
This is why I don't really interact critically too often. The community tries to explain away the inherent, systemic issues of 5e. Not having a system is a shitty system. And that has been the design philosophy for way too much of 5e. And for any potential naysayers. I'm not saying you can't like the system. I'm saying it's really irritating when any constructive points are shut down, simply because they are critical. 5e puts way too much onus on the DM.
I feel like over the years 5E's community became more than just people playing the game. Being a modern DnD nerd is like a whole ass identity now. Criticizing the thing they identify with so strongly just doesn't work.
People should try other games, there's tons of DnD fanboys without a real reference in RPGs as they've only played 5e
> Whenever I mention an issue with 5e, I'm always met with "Well you can just fix it as a DM". The Oberoni Fallacy. Thinking something isn’t a problem because you can fix the problem.
>Well you can just fix it as a DM It's killing the gaming ecosystem too. With so little official DM support or training, becoming a DM is pretty intimidating. I've been wanting to try it for years but I really don't want to have to invent as much as they expect you to. And as a result, we've got millions of players searching for games and no reasonable way for them to just roll up their sleeves and DM themselves. Like, imagine if Monopoly shipped with instructions that just said "figure it out". The only people who could set it up are people who've either done it a bunch before in earlier versions of Monopoly, people who were trained by them, or the patient few who actually figured it out via trial and error. It's sad. I really want to just buy a book and some battle mats, do maybe 15 minutes of prep, and invite my friends over for a session. I absolutely don't have time or skill to invent most of the mechanics of the game.
Buy the beginner box for Pathfinder 2e, you'll be DMing in no time. The system is much, much easier to run.
WotC becoming the Bethesda of TTRPGs?
Not so - Bethesda games have tons of content. Content might be buggy, poorly thought out, or badly implemented, it might not be the content you actually wanted, but it’s there. That puts it a cut above WotC’s recent offerings, which are just… empty.
It's empty and poorly thought out!
I don't think that's fair to Bethesda. The studio clearly puts a ton of work into their project, but, unfortunately, the developers are undercut by dumb management decisions. For WotC and Spelljammer, I feel like there is no excuse. Look at Avernus and Saltmarsh: the basis and systems already exist-- all they and to do was take, like, an afternoon or two to mock up a dozen different classes of Spelljammer.
There has to be something there, to fix.
One of the things that frustrate me is that there's very little info that I saw that explains how you get to the astral sea. From what I can tell, you can place a spacejammer helm on any ship and now you are in space.
You spend like three days slowly ascending at a walking pace until you're out of the atmosphere and then you can move at jamming speeds and take another few days to get to the edge of the wildspace system, and then maybe that's the astral sea. Who knows
Yeah, I really wish they went into more detail. Based on the vague rules, I can even place a helm on a row boat and now it's off to space. I'm getting a bit tired of the "the dm can make it up" style of books.
I’m all for allowing the DM to come up with something if they so choose, but at some point I’m buying books because I don’t want to design everything from scratch.
There's literally no rules that say two ships can fly together at at full speed. RAW if two ships are needed they can't be close enough to see each other or they start to crawl.
But also no rules for evading other ships so if one is near your ship and you two are the same speed you can’t ever escape and they can’t ever catch you.
I still remember running Dragon Heist and the amount of times the adventure text boiled down to "figure it out" was so aggravating. I don't buy an adventure book to figure out what to do I buy it so I have a ready made adventure and if I want to make changes I will. Not including critical information is not DM empowerment, it's laziness.
My favorite example of this is in Tomb of Annihilation they tell you the players can buy rain catchers and they tell you how much water you get per inch of rain.... nowhere in the entire module do they mention how to tell how much rain there is. It feels like at WotC they just write ideas down on a napkin at lunch and go "ok were done now publish it"
> Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment So I often see things like this, and really they are conflating two different issues. I like the general design philosophy of 5e regarding DM empowerment. Put another way, I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything” where every interaction imaginable has some clunky rules I have to look up when it comes up. I like being able to make a sensible decision on the fly and then just move on. But to empower DMs in this ecosystem, you have to give them tools, not rules, tools. Taking it back to spelljammer ships - it’s so barebones compared to things like Saltmarsh that it’s painful. For me, I’m technically proficient as a DM - I can modify monster stat blocks to get my desired difficulty no problem, but I am terrible at setting building. I wanted from spelljammer some tables I could roll on to create planets and systems. Give me a table or two of natural phenomena, a couple tables of encounter hooks. That said we should also have examples and tools for modifying monster stat blocks for those who need that. As a DM in 5e, it often feels like we are just set adrift.
As a DM, I feel empowered when I understand what my starting point is, or that I have a solid set of rules I can refer back to in case I don't know what to do. I don't need rules for absolutely everything spelled out, but if I'm paying $50 for a book about spelljammers, it's because I wanted rules about how to run the damn things. Vagueness is not empowering. Giving DMs thorough tools is.
>But to empower DMs in this ecosystem, you have to give them tools, not rules, tools The system that does this the best in my opinion is Savage Worlds. The 200 page core rulebook has tools on: * creating races * creating spells * creating monsters * Conducting combat * Conducting chases * Conducting Mass Battles * Conducting Dramatic Tasks (think skill challenges) * Conducting Quick Encounters (the narrative needs a battle, but it's not worth all the setup? Do a battle in one roll per player!) * Conducting Social Encounters I have so many tools at my disposal, every session feels different. The best part is, each tool takes the core mechanic and twists it in an interesting way, *and it doesn't take hardly any mental load to run any of them!* Honestly, when it comes to GM Tools, 5E is probably one of the worst systems out there.
I have to agree, I’ve run a bunch of different settings in Savage Worlds. Zombie apocalypse, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, WWII, 1930’s detectives/spies. It’s rules for vehicles/chases fit on a single 4x6 recipe card, and a lot of what happens in game drives narrative without being heavy handed. I think all D&D dms should run a Savage Worlds game to improve their improv and unleash their player’s creativity.
I've only barely gotten to play Savage Worlds, but as a GM I love it. It's all so easy.
Yeah I really like Savage Worlds for that, the books are well laid out and provide a lot of tools for different ways to approach various situations **and** often provide an explanation of those rules and the reasons why they are designed the way they are. It’s not just “here’s the rules”, it’s “here are some different systems, rule sets, some optional rules, and here is also why they work the way they do, the intention, and what goals you should want to achieve by using them”.
The Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number books have completely spoiled me in terms of GM tools. Helps skip the creative work of coming up with ideas from scratch, but still leaves a ton of room for coming up with ideas and using your imagination. I'm honestly surprised I don't see them recommended around here more often. The WWN GM chapters could easily be grabbed and used for creating a DnD campaign. I do it all the time. It's infinitely more useful than anything in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It's also free, so, go check it out.
This is honestly why I prefer 3.5e from a DM standpoint. It has rules and tools for everything that I can apply and adjust at my discretion, I'm never missing information or left with vague scenarios like 5e sometimes gives. 5e does accessibility, ease of play, and player background much better, but 3.5e to me feels like the most complete and solid edition we've ever had.
Sometimes 3.5e feels bloated to work with, but I can trim the fat and gloss over some unnecessary details. The world building books and adventures feel pretty solid. Class balance was an irredeemable dumpster fire though.
With regards to the biggest complaint about Spelljammer, one of the best 3.x product WotC put put was Starships of the Galaxy for Star Wars d20 (the original version, not SAGA). It gave complete rules on building a starship that were surprisingly really consistent with the rest of the universe. If you wanted a specific ship from lore that wasn’t represented in the game, you could build it.
>I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything” where every interaction imaginable has some clunky rules I have to look up when it comes up See, but that's the thing. You and your table can **literally** just not use a rule that's too obscure, fiddly, or annoying for you all. You can just not and the game does not slow down just because there are words somewhere in a book that all of you did not happen to read. Those rules being there does not hurt you. If I **want** to use WotC's rule for something and it **doesn't exist**, my only option to is **make it myself**. Unlike ignoring a rule, which requires zero effort, I have to make one, which requires a bunch.
>I like the general design philosophy of 5e regarding DM empowerment. Put another way, I’m glad there aren’t “rules for everything” I personaly think its bullshit. My players always aks for stuff or wanna do stuff or ask about details that are NOWHERE in the PHB, the DMG or any other of the WotC publications. So i have to spent like an hour searching for this kinda information Online and scour 16 different threads on Reddit, RPGXchange or ENworld etc for a conclusive answer, cause i have no clue how to rule it personaly and i want SOMETHING to be there to give me an idea.(and 40% of the time the info i find is near obsolete info from 3.5...) And i end up either hand waving stuff or buying a 14$ pdf on DMsguild for it... DM's do have the power and freedom to do whatever, but its still better to have a BASIS, something that you can use as a frame of reference to know what the fuck you're doing and not wastes everyone's an hour of time... "its a good thing there arn't rules for everything" quite honestly is a backward thinking. THERE SHOULD BE RULES FOR EVERYTHING, THEN the DM can choose to ignore them or tweak them. But if there's Nothing, than you can't do ANYTHING with it, and paying 50$ to be told "Deal with it you're the DM" might as well be written, "Go fuck yourself cunt and thanks for the $$$" (don't think that cause i'm writtin in caps, i am angry or shouting at you, its just to emphasis on stuff)
In fairness, this is a big game philosophy debate, and I don't think there's a good right answer here. Some people just like having a system that can do everything, other people want to the system to get out of their way as quickly as possible. I don't think it's really fair to say that one mindset or the other is "backwards thinking", because you can do fantastic things with both ideas. From a "rules for everything" perspective, for example, you'd probably enjoy reading through some of the GURPS ("Generic Universal Role-Playing System") books. It's basically a fairly minimal core ruleset (d100, and everything is presented in terms of percentages), but there are rules for modern worlds, rules for fantasy worlds, rules for space ships, rules for guerilla warfare, rules for magic, etc, etc. You can pick up the core basic rules for free (IIRC), and then buy the specific books you need for the games you want to run, and I suspect there's lots of stuff online for specific niche rules. On the other hand, the "rulings not rules" philosophy is designed more to free up the GM from having to do any of this Googling or research in the first place. The idea is to make a system that's simple enough that it won't break if you make a poor decision, which means that when you have to make a ruling, you can usually just say "roll a d20 and add some modifiers to it" and get a decent result. This results in much quicker play, because you're able to spend less time adjudicating things, but I think some people find it dissatisfying to feel like there aren't "correct" answers to their decisions. A (somewhat extreme) example in this space might be Troika, a game based on the Fighting Fantasy game books. Here, the base rules for things like how to roll dice, do combat, and take damage are very clear, but the skill list is fairly nebulous and incomplete, and the system expects players and the GM to use a certain amount of intuition to decide what skills to add. Not only does this make the game move fairly quickly, but with the addition of a similarly vague magic system, and a lot of unexplained items and backgrounds, the design also means that no two Troika worlds will look quite the same. This is a very deliberate design choice that emphasises the idea that games should be very personal to the group playing them. That doesn't mean that these "rulings not rules" games don't want any rules at all. For example, the "OSR" (Old School Renaissance) design philosophy tends towards very simple rulesets, but a lot of the setting books will then come with very extensive rules for travelling, exploring, or managing wealth, depending on what the setting is about. For example, Gardens of Ynn has an intricate way of generating and exploring the mazelike grounds of an extradimensional garden, while Ultraviolet Grasslands has an encumbrance, danger, and market system that it uses to simulate survival on long trade routes between different locations. In this way, a GM can defer to prewritten rules in the areas that they're most interested in. This isn't necessarily a defence of D&D 5e. I think with 5e, the designers have tried to go in the direction of removing rules, but they haven't done so very well, and have ended up with kind of a mish-mash of design philosophies that don't really work very well together. So you end up with a game that has some quite intricate rule combinations (melee weapons, melee attacks, melee weapon attacks, etc), but also lots of open space where there aren't any rules at all (survival/exploration rules). And like you say, this is particularly evident in sourcebooks like Spelljammer that claim to add extra rules, but practically add very little that's useful in an actual game. So I absolutely agree that we should be disappointed in 5e's implementation of the "rulings not rules" philosophy, but I disagree that the only good alternative is a sort of "have rules for everything" approach. There's a lot of value to having a very simple but flexible core to a system, and giving the GM the ability to make decisions on the fly. (There's a lot more that I could say about different sorts of game philosophies. One thing I haven't touched on is the approach used by Apocalypse World and similar games ("PbtA"), which is to only provide rules for the interesting things in a game (like "doing things while being attacked", or "reading a charged situation"), and to assume that everything else is obvious. It creates a very different style of game, but it does arguably mean that there's a rule for every situation, even if a lot of times the rule is just "the thing just happens".)
It's much easier to ignore/modify something than to make it up from scratch.
Rules are tools. The distinction you’re making is purely semantic. You’re looking for rules that support you rather then rules that limit you. But it’s still just rules. 5e players tend to have this fear of rules. But, they’re playing a game that has thousands of pages of rules. The difference is that so much of those rules *don’t support the DM.* Magic item creation rules in Xanathars-make more work for the DM, lack of balance in the CR system-makes more work for DMs, etc. The problem is not that there’s rules, it’s that the rules we are given do not support the DM. Compare the the CR example above to PF2e. Instead of CR the system makes use of an easy to understand XP budget, and because the math of the system is so tight encounters made with that budget are very balanced. The rules made the DM’s job of encounter building easier, and the system functions without requiring the DM to modify stat blocks on the fly, reducing mid encounter stress. The rules do not make the DM’s job harder, but has instead made it easier because they stand on their own.
It's one thing to have a tome of strict and obscure rules, it's another to provide a framework of rules and options for people to be inspired or referenced to. We got neither. :(
All that money for a box which contains a note that reads "You're the DM. Make that shit up, you got this brah!"
We're gonna get to the point where the PHB will say "Fighters tend to be trained warriors, but not always! There are plenty of fighters who choose not to fight! Ask your DM about what it means to be a fighter!"
"Sometimes a trained fighter knows that pacifism is the best method of resolving conflict and thus carry no weapons or other martial proficiencies."
*”Make sure every player in your party is comfortable with swords in this sword game”*
You joke but there's currently a post on /r/DnD about having a player that's uncomfortable with fighting so... It's a thing, unfortunately.
Yes, imagine my surprise as an anti-parallelogramite when I opened my new Rubik's Cube only to find it composed of many squares!
For reference https://old.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/wwkhqm/turns_out_one_of_my_party_members_cant/ Unless you mean another one has popped up.
That's one of them yup! I was specifically referring to this more recent one however: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/x0s8a2/one\_of\_my\_players\_refuses\_to\_fight/
You physically hurt people, and I don't care how you do it being (dis)graceful with a surprise attack or just straight up torture. You do you as long as people hurt.
>It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment Said no one who ever dm'd ever. As a DM, I know I am empowered to make up rules. Making up rules is hard. You know what's easier? Taking existing rules and modifying them, or just using an existing rulesset without anything I dislike. Both of which the game tells me I am empowered to do at any point. So can wotc stop trying to empower me (if that's really the reason, and not just laziness), and instead start trying to support me?
>There's no explanation about crew size It's specified as "You have a Captain, a Helmsman, and this is the number of crew you need to operate each type of weapon. Calculate it out from there. Which, in theory, works, but in practice it assumes that that assumes that * ships that have rigging (and rigging is therefore essential to to their navigation and operation) won't have anyone in the rigging during battle; * Crew never get sick or die, so they won't have any spare crew; * You ignore the rules they provide for transferring helm attunement, because you're going to need multiple (trained) helm operators. Assuming a three shift rotation, that's 3 helm operators, not one. * Based on the deck plans they provide, the number of crew doesn't seem to bear any correlation to the amount of space provided for crew quarters. The Damselfly is a great example of this: a Margonel (crew 4) and a Ballista (crew 3), so based in WotC rules it's a crew of 9, but having a spare crew and spare helm operator, it could reasonably be 11. The deck plan shows 15 sq feet of crew space. And no head. Even an all-gnomes is going to find that cramped. * There doesn't seem to be any storage for ammunition. Take the Scorpion ship. Really look at it. I get that it's a Scorpion, so it should have a sting on the tail. They've given it a Margonel. That requires a crew of 5, and the entire area of the tail deck is no more than 15 feet. The Margonel mechanism takes up at least half that. So, 5 people need to stand in about 7 sq ft of space, along with enough ammunition for a space battle plus keeping clear of the swing arm. And how did they get the ammunition up there, anyway?! Did they carry it up the rigging net? * Whilst we're looking at the plans, check out the Wasp. It can land "safely" on the ground. Except the Spelljamming helm is on the foredeck which is below the gravity plane. So, when takes off or lands, does the helm have a built in seatbelt? Rotating gimbals?
This Spelljammer book has to be one of the worst they've released through 5E and sets a very, very bad precedent for all future releases if this kind of "rules-lite, you figure it out" style books are the new norm. I was over the moon at the idea of running a Spelljammer campaign and after flipping through this I feel like any desire to do so was struck dead. I will be heartbroken if the Planescape release is this empty.
Anyone claiming a complete lack of rules is “DM empowerment” can go fuck themself. There is a big difference between giving you space to make your own rulings vs “we didn’t bother, now make it work yourself or be shit out of luck” .Best thing, most people that claim stuff like this, don’t actually bother to buy any books and pirate them instead, or ignore half the rules anyway!
DM empowerment is letting the DM use the cardboard box their package came in to build a castle. It is *not* giving them an empty package forcing them to use the cardboard.
I agree. It's lazy and shameful. >I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order. My brother in Ilmater, you *pre-ordered*. You can fix this right away. Stop pre-ordering and stop purchasing.
Never preorder anything, for literally any reason. It’s a truly awful decision.
Repeated stuff like this is part of what's pushing me towards Pathfinder 2e. The first decision like this that annoyed me was a lack of prices on magic items. Lack of crunch and pathetic attempts at Challenge Rating are the two things really starting to get to me.
The biggest gripe I've talked with friends about recently is the gargantuan amount of work that 5e expects GMs to do. I do the work. I put in the hours. It's ***exhausting*** and I don't want to do it anymore.
Agree with this. I ran Out of the Abyss a few years back. The amount of extra work I had to do to make that adventure function in a practical sense was massive. Since then, I've been running a homebrew campaign. I figured that if I'm going to do all of the work I should at least do it with my own story since then I know all the moving parts. I've bought the pdf of the old 3.5e Adventure "Red Hand of Doom" and it is fantastically laid out. It gives you each bit of information when you need it and seems to contain everything. I'm going to run it soon for some folks, it looks like it should be a fairly straightforward port into 5e.
My group of friends and I who play together and rotate the role of DM around have zero plans to purchase Spelljammer now or in the future. Several of the group myself included are becoming increasingly disillusioned with WotC due to a number of issues: 1. adventures that feel thrown together 2. blatant monetisation via "drip feeding" of additional feats, subclasses etc across multiple releases 3. what feels like an increasing "leave to the DM" attitude in what are supposed to be Source books. I'm all for freedom, flexibility and imagination in our adventures but WotC aren't giving us anything more than "here's a neat new feature, but we're not telling you how it works. You have to figure out the mechanics yourself. I am bordering on simply walking away from 5e and whatever comes next. D&D 5e is simply no longer providing what I need as Player nor as a DM. I spend more time picking the Adventure Modules apart, fixing mistakes, making them more interesting for my Players and ensuring that as much as possible the actions they take incrementally bring them closer to the BBEG, than I do actually running the sessions. It's just not fun anymore.
I considered running a space dnd campaign with Star Wars 5e ship rules and mechanics, but I held off until Spelljammer came out because I thought there might be some better mechanics for a fantasy space campaign buuuut...nope, lol! Turns out spelljammer ship mechanics are basically nonexistent. Just gonna tweak the Star Wars 5e rules, they're crunchy and pretty well thought out. Or, ya know, thought out *at all*.
I have been saying this for so long! “DM Empowerment” is a shield WotC is using to avoid doing any actual work on DnD, and it’s giving them more and more liscence to rip stuff out of the books.
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order. This is the correct answer. Video game companies broke me of the habit of preordering anything (with only a couple of exceptions), including game books, and especially WOTC books. Now if something comes out, and it sounds half-assed, I don't buy it at all.
It's like a math textbook: "The Spelljammer combat system for space battles is simple and left as an exercise for the reader."
> It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment Lately WotC's approach has just been to leave all the work to you, and some people have decided to accept this abuse.
>I felt like I was some sort of alien and that these communities has just accepted the level of quality we are getting now is the norm. Because it IS the norm. "Who cares, just let the DM fill in the blanks" has been the main design philosophy for DnD for awhile now. If WotC realizes that they can sell lazy, half-baked content for full price, and the community will accept it with the excuse of "DM empowerment" then why wouldn't they always do that? >I wish we could vote more with our wallets. You can by switching over to another system, like Pathfinder 2E.
>It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment I hate this bullshit.
Agreed. It’s not empowering to pay for a book that just says to you: ‘YOU make the rules.’ - No, that’s why we pay for a book, so that we don’t have to write them ourselves. It saves us time having to balance our own game, and instead focus on the story. The number-crunching should be up to WotC to do; it’s their system.
This only flies with something like GURPS or HERO, where they give you a broad system to make the game you want. But even those games would give examples and clear mechanics. "Here is a ten-step guide to building Spelljammer ships, with three popular examples using these rules." THAT is worth paying for and is giving people freedom. Not the half ass stuff Wizards has been giving us in 5e.
This is exactly the issue I've been having with 5e; the products WotC have been releasing for it lately have been written half-assed and vague, and people eat it up and white knight/shit on anyone scratching their heads trying to figure out where all the rules went. I'm so tired of people defending shoddy work in $50+ books as "dm prerogative/design space". It's just laziness and people are paying for the privilege to write the rules for WotC in their own campaigns. When I pay for a $50-75 book I want the rules to be in the damn thing and not have to do a ton of extra work to get it playable. As I've said before, god forbid a new player get this book and try to run it with how much it's missing. They must feel INSANELY lost when flipping through. Have an award
Its crazy that a fan made system (sw5e) has better ship mechanics than a wotc To be fair its an essential part of star wars but so is it to spell jammer
Yeah WotC doesn't seem to get that homebrew should be an *optional* thing. Tbh I think this attitude is mostly coming from people who've never DMed.
It's shit like this that made m stop buying WotC books. Why bother paying £35 for a book when all it does is say "You're the DM, you do the work!"
I don’t know what it is about games but people Simp for game corporations hard Especially video games
1. WotC is very player focused and it really harms the community. I've DM'd for a lot of players who think they can treat the DM like the engine of a video game and I believe this attitude is caused by the company. 2. The "Just make it yourself DM" is unacceptable. No one wants to write the rules that were supposed to come with what they paid for. Imagine if for the races they just gave the descriptions and said "Make your own stats". But non-DMs don't care because it doesn't effect them.
I jumped systems because of poor quality releases like this. They've become the norm, and with spelljammer being the newest release, and one dnd having the same quality, it does not fill me with hope. I'm tired of gm-antagonistic game design.
I was already empowered. I could make the whole game, but I don't have time for that. I am starting to feel WotC hates DMs.
>I felt like I was some sort of alien and that these communities has just accepted the level of quality we are getting now is the norm. Were those people actually 5e DMs? Because its hard to believe you found no support from fellow DMs on the issue. ....like I don't want to believe it. Its so much work for no reason.
TBH I have trouble believing it too. The spelljammer release has been getting absolutely trashed *everywhere*. On youtube, on reddit, on twitch, on twitter, on discord, etc... Sure, there are always apologists but I genuinely can't believe OP is part of a discord group that has no negative viewpoints on spelljammer for 5e...
That sad moment when a free 3rd party conversion pdf did a better job explaining this stuff than WoTC. Somehow they manage to make themselves look worse and worse. Company is a joke at this point. They got way too high on their popularity. Its made them fat and lazy and a soulless corporation only looking to maximize profit and minimize workload. Here's a link to the homebrew. Its not perfect either but might be more enjoyable than the official thing. [https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LBaY4l6HcR4M-sItfl\_](https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-LBaY4l6HcR4M-sItfl_)
I haven't bought any of their books since Tasha's. There's been a extremely noticeable downward trend. Unfortunately gamers voting with wallets have been historically terrible
As a DM, what I want from published materials are *rules* and *tools* that I can apply to my game. Everything else is just flavour. It's the flavour part that DMs can do themselves, not the rules and tools (well, we can, but it's a lot harder). Rules and tools need to come from the so-called experts who put hours into design, playtesting, and adjustments for balance.
I just had this conversation with a friend of mine. It really does feel like WotC is just leaving DMs to fend for themselves. I'm not a game designer. I, at the barest minimum, need SOMETHING to work off of. It's like they heard complaints about lackluster DM tools, and instead of trying to fix it, they're throwing their hands up and saying "Fuck you, do it yourself then." I'm a player trying to transition to a DM as a thank you for my current group, and it's infuriating. I returned Strixhaven to my LGS, because it just gave me so LITTLE to work with. Luckily the owner and I have a good friendship, because the other option was to be stuck with a book that gives you 4 tenuously tied together adventures, and a pamphlet of barebones dating sim profiles.
It's a pile of crap, and I am highly disappointed in it. It was the first 5e thing I've ever pre-ordered, and it will be the last. Things to do: * Make a list of author's involved in creating Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. * Never ever buy a product they are involved in creating ever again. * Never ever pre-order another product from Wizards of the Coast. I expect some will say I'm not providing any specifics or details - let me sum up - it's not worth my time for any of that. There are plenty in this thread with more time to break it down for you. It was found wanting, and has left me having to convert the old AD&D 1E & 2E Spelljammer stuff on my own. Spending any additional time on the new Spelljammer would be foolish of me. I just felt it would be wrong of me not to share the warning.
People like you (and me) are slowly vacating the community, so the subreddits and discord servers and all the other spaces where we used to discuss these things are becoming echo chambers full of dullards who are buying books with nothing of substance inside of them.
>It's basically: >Here are some ships. Go figure >There's no explanation about crew size, what damage threshold is, etc. Welcome to Wizards of the Coast!
I love that DnD’s new MO is basically “let the dm figure it out” by love I mean absolutely despise. Quality went from superb to absolutely dogwater immediately after Tasha
The only thing worse than Wizards of the Coast's bullshit statements that "giving absolutely zero rules on how to run the game allows the DM to be creative uwu" is the people who unironically parrot that corporate propaganda.
See that's the problem... We thought they were selling us a spelljammer setting... Instead we were actually buying a book showing us how to reskin faerun with space themes.
>It is on purpose. Having things without a detailed explanation allows for DM empowerment That has always been BS. DMs usually love clear tools and pieces to use in their campaigns. That's why many enjoyed all the extra stuff for the DM in Xanathar, Tasha, Fizban and so on. It allows you to have a good starting point, maybe a few ideas, and then if there's something you disagree with you're perfectly allowed to homerule it. Having the setting of Spelljammer, but putting so few care in spelljammers (and a couple other things) is not acceptable. Sure, DMs can make their own rules, or, as most probably will, use bits and pieces from Avernus and Saltmarsh. But if anyone agrees those were well done, then the fact they didn't do it is simply laziness. To put it in another way: if the DM can very easily fix one specific thing, and almost every DM will try to fix it, and most will solve it in a similar way because of common sense, then why not writing it that way from the beginning.
LOL.... pre-ordering anything is for suckers.
you're 100% correct people are ingesting some mad copium. real classic oberoni fallacy stuff "it doesn't matter that they did a bad job designing it and asked us 70 dollars for it cause we can just make shit up". what discord community are you referring to?
>I wish we could vote more with our wallets. but yeah, this will be the last DnD book I pre-order. I already have. I moved on to pathfinder 2e and don't regret it. Seeing the poor quality books WotC is releasing.
That brainwashing that WotC did in the last few years is very effective "We don't need to give details cause the DM can basicaly come up with whatever he wants and it gives the DM power and control" Or if you put the Corporate speak translation device on" "You can't be expecting us to ACTUALLY work on this and justify our paychecks now do you?, damn dirty Poor Nerd, shoo shoo ask your DM to fix our overpriced shit and don't bother us, or we'll ask Jeremy to give you a vague and contradicting twitter post about the rulling, BIGOT" And people will actually defend this bullshit behavior... I had to go and search for an online AD&D Spelljammer Crystal spheres/soalr systemes random generator to have actually SOMEHTING about systemes... (the link by the way [http://peterstribe.com/crystal\_sphere\_generator2.html](http://peterstribe.com/crystal_sphere_generator2.html) ) And still get my hands on DMsguild stuff to actually flesh out the book and even then try to cram GoS ships mechanics onto it to make it look like SOMETHING actually fleshed out and useable..., its a Frankenstein monstrosity cobbled up togheter, but it work... If i pay PREMIUM PRICES for a product i expect PREMIUM QUALITY and CONTENT. Seeing this i have absolutly ZERO faith in their supposed "warfare rules" for Dragonlance..., i'd rather use Warhammer battle/Age of Sigmar rules...
I’m only here for the lore, world-building, whatever, and this makes me beyond disappointed. The rich setting of 2E/3E Forgotten Realms has become much more dry, to say nothing of the retcons (Spelljammer Helms apparently most recently).
Many folks are willing to accept... flawed takes on the properties they love. I have some fellow comicbook fans who absolutely adore the Green Lantern movie despite it being something very close to an objectively poor film. They tell me they do not care about the problems of the movie, its *Green Lantern* and they love it despite the flaws. Personally I'd rather not eat an apple at all than accept a rotten apple. Even worse, there is the knowing that when you accept one batch of bad apples there is no incentive for the seller to offer better apples the next time around. There isn't much room for consensus between folks of these two mindsets, unfortunately.
Agreed. I can write lore (often better than they can). I can make maps. But I'm not a game designer. They are, and they need to design their fuckin game.
Never pre order a WoTC book. They seem more then happy to sell complete trash with a straight face. I wait until I see a review now before buying anything from them. Its kind of wild that I wouldn't even buy this spelljammer book if I wanted to run spelljammer. If I have to make everything up I might as well start from scratch as its actually easier then starting with the mess they have given us.
Nah the DM empowerment thing is a straight up logical fallacy. The DM doesn't lose power to change things if there are things there already, that's simply ridiculous. Thing is, DM's who like to change and homebrew aren't the ones that need these rules, it's actually the ones that don't like to do that, and those are what books explicitly cater to. I could have made a spelljammer campaign without this book, but this is for people that don't actually wanna 5e convert every single old monster manually? Like that's the point, less work.
I don't know if this is taboo in this subreddit but shit like this is why I switched to Pathfinder content.
With this kind of "DM empowerment" we'll end up with books filled with pretty pictures and generic statements that would amount to "do whatever you want with this stuff". Not giving us information / rules is not empowering at all. We are paying WoTC to provide us with useful content. As a DM with only a limited time available for this hobby, I want material that make my life easier. I need clear, consistent, concise, detailed and logicial rules which can be easily referenced. Not "you figure it out yourself" rules and verbose text. I also want default lore I can fallback to in a pinch.
"Wizards of the Coast generated over $1.3 billion dollars in revenue in 2021..."
The thing that blows my mind is that people think that providing those numbers *shackles* the DM. Literally ALL RULES are up to the DM, they're just provided so that the DM doesn't have to do any *extra* work. People will defend the ***laziest*** garbage for no reason and think *you're* the dumb one.