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Oct 14 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
There is a whole lot into going on the the most recent UA, so we're on episode three of @BrandesStoddard and @DMSamuel look at it, and I'm here for it, because #oneDnd is now taking up an inordinant amount of my brainspace. Don't be ADD online and have things you care about.
Anyway, since I've got three blog posts on this, as well as potentially mutiple episodes of @Thac0wA looking at this as well, I again don't have TOO much to say about this episode, other than that Brandes and Sam have some great insights into this.
Brandes and Sam dive into some discussion of if #dnd5e will be supported in the future on D&D Beyond, and the wider philosophy of digital "ownership" of material. I think this is an important discussion to have.
I will say that when it comes to looking at past WotC decisions, and mapping that to an overall digital strategy, I don't think previous decisions are as likely to be a signpost of what might happen in the future. Mainly because Hasbro has it's eye on WotC right now.
Hasbro appointed a former Microsoft exec to "guide" D&D into its digital era, and I'm assuming he's going to be much more hands on with any of their policies regarding digital content and presentation. I don't know what that means for D&D and digital assets.
I strongly suspect it means that the strategy may take as much inspiration from software company strategies as it does anything we currently see in the tabletop gamespace.

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More from @WhatDoIKnowJR

Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 14
Okay, time to reminisce about a campaign I never got to finish as a player. I was playing an Eladrin paladin from the Feywild. He was extremely naive, and on top of that, his mother told him his father was Corellon, and he often led with that in conversations.
One of the other members of the party was an Eladrin thief who grew up on the Prime Material plane, and my character was convinced that if he could trust anyone, it must be another Eladrin.
Anyway, one corner of the continent was suddenly covered in night. We were told that this sounded suspiciously like what happened with an Apocalypse Clock had one of its segments filled in.
Read 11 tweets
Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 14
I'm by no means saying D&D 4e was perfect. Anyone that has followed me for any length of time knows I have definitely not held that opinion. But "D&D 4e was an MMO" is a tired critique. People think this is a major arguement against the game.
MMOs adapted rules from TTRPGs in a medium that works for video games, and TTRPGs adapt really good video game ideas back into TTRPGs as well. The Clock, one of the current favorite TTRPG mechanics, is definitely something you could say has been done in video games.
I also don't like to use the term "WotC" too broadly, because that lumps in everybody at the company as a united whole. There are plenty of people that work on a specific game that love that game and want it to be the best.
Read 7 tweets
Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 14
I'll be honest, I'm more concerned about the future of D&D based on Hasbro's aggresive growth plan more than any designer decisions. Despite the narratives, what really made D&D 4e into a perceived failure was the expectations Hasbro put on the game.
We're in an era where I don't think its hyperbolic to say that corporations have zero shame in assuming that they must have record profits every single year, and are planning exponential growth from everything that shows promise.
That also sets up product lines to crash and burn, not when they do poorly, but when they don't provide exponential growth for their parent company. I don't think Hasbro will abandon a brand that has the name recognition that D&D has.
Read 8 tweets
Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 14
We finally got to play our Star Trek Adventures game again after several false starts. We played part two of our pilot episode.
Our NPC captain is a cyborg who was badly injured at Wolf 359 and in the Dominion War. Her ship is the last Centaur class ship still in operation, and it was a former technology testbed, meaning it is a bit patchwork.
She is a bit fatalistic about her future once her ship is decommissioned and if she will have a place in the galaxy once her ship is gone.
Read 17 tweets
Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 13
Speaking of partial compatibility, between 3.5 and 3.0, there were a lot of prestige classes that would work pretty well, as an example. Most feats weren't affected by the changes. That means a lot of player facing options were still on the table.
Despite this, a lot of people felt that stuff made for 3.0 was going to be inferior to 3.5, even from design houses that had traditionally been really solid with their design philosophies. 3.0 adventures could be used pretty painlessly, however . . .
City of the Spider Queen had SO MANY NPCs that relied on how haste worked in 3.0, that it did dramatically change the feel of some of those encounters to run them with the "new" version of haste, which often didn't do much to help the NPCs that had it in their spell lists.
Read 12 tweets
Jared Rascher, Demilich (He/Him) Profile picture
Oct 13
We only touched on this briefly, but @orikes13 and I talked a little bit about random encounters in 5e when looking at the most recent UA for @Thac0wA for our upcoming episode. As much as I love D&D 5e, random encounters while traveling have little impact.
I first noticed this when I was running Storm King's Thunder, and realizing that the party was going full in on every hostile encounter, because they were unlikely to have more than one encounter per day.
They can still be fun, but they won't have any lasting effects on the party, as long as you are assuming that PCs are getting a long rest at the end of every day of travel. Adventures in Midde-earth made the change that you don't get a long rest until after you complete a Journey
Read 10 tweets

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